Over the past 5 years I have wrestled with how to have a healthy relationship with my smartphone. Specifically, I've been learning how to have an owner-tool relationship, not a consumer-producer one.

While this isn't easy, I do believe I have made significant progress. My phone is now much more of an information and communication tool to me and I no longer feel subservient to its endless entertainment and distraction offerings.

This post will serve as a reminder to future me not to slip into old, bad habits, and hopefully provide some not-totally-useless information for anyone who has somehow stumbled here and is looking to build a better relationship with their phone.

"why don't you just get a flip phone?"

This is not a terrible suggestion, and is one I often get in response when discussing this topic. I even have a colleague who does exactly this and seems reasonably happy with his decision. However, smartphones are not an inherently bad thing. Mine provides a huge amount of utility to my daily life that I would much rather have than not have. A few examples that are particularly important to me:

• Information lookup - the Wikipedia app is honestly phenomenal and being able to carry the majority of human knowledge within my pocket is a pretty big win IMO.
• Banking stuff - Money is stressful. Tracking all aspects of it is a pain and something I want to do as easily and quickly as possible. That means doing it online (rip UK bank branches). Many banks require that you have a mobile phone for accessing these online services. Dealing with this is my smartphone-less colleague's main complaint and one I really don't want to deal with.
• Travelling - Maps, reviews, WhatsApp and Meetup for finding people to hang with. All of these things and more make the experience of travelling to a new place richer and even more enjoyable for me.
• Contacting the people I love - Yeah you can video call from a laptop. But I don't want to carry a laptop everywhere with me, especially not when travelling. Being able to video call my mum from the top of a mountain in the Canary Islands while she's on a boat in the Shetland Islands is unfathomably-awesome and not something I want to opt-out of just because shareholders are breathing down Zuck's neck about ad revenue.

tool, not 'tertainment*

Wanting to not spend 30 hours a week on instagram reels, and wanting to use the above utilities to improve my life and connect with those I can't be physically with, do not need to be mutually-exclusive goals.

my phone is a tool, not entertainment.

This is the mentality that has slowly crystallised over the past 5 years, when I first realised that social media was doing me more harm than good.

Rather than belabouring the point and trying to describe what this means, I'm going to describe what approaches didn't work for me, which ones did (and do) work for me, and the tools that help turn this way of thinking into a set of real-life actions and boundaries.

* I will not apologise for my agonising alliteration

thing that didn't work

using any social media, at all

I'm a bit of an all-or-nothing person. Or at least that's how I label myself, who knows how true it is. Either way, I lack the self-control to resist the dark patterns of social media apps, and the built in time-limits on most modern smartphones and social media apps can easily be overridden with a couple of thumb taps.

Any time I've ever tried to set usage limits in any way, it has failed. It'll go well for a few days, sometimes even a few weeks if I'm really lucky and get a particularly large burst of willpower, but eventually something caves. I've had a bad day, or a good day, or I'm particularly bored, or any one of a million little reasons that let me justify turning off the timer "just this once", and that's it, within days I'm back to scrolling and mindlessly-watching for hours every day.

going cold turkey without a plan

Some days, when I was particularly sick with myself for whatever app I'd been binging that day, I'd mass-uninstall everything in frustration and tell myself "no more". While this may work for others, these emotion-fuelled rage quits never last for me. The next day I'll laugh at myself at how I'd been overreacting, or justify to myself that again I can do things "in moderation", and soon enough I'd be back down at the bottom of my short-form content slippery slope.

things that do work

patience, planning, prophylaxis

The first step that made a meaningful difference to me in reducing my phone usage was accepting that it is an addiction and that it is not within my control. Accepting that I needed to be patient and kind with myself was a precursor to any real progress. This acceptance is a constant battle in and of itself, one that I still have yet to master (and maybe never will, and that's okay).

Planning helps to circumvent the downsides of the rage-induced cold turkey quits. Sitting down with a journal and writing down why it is exactly I want to use my phone less, listing out all the things I'd rather spend my time doing, etc., helps me build a more solid emotional foundation for any future decisions.

Prophylaxis is the pre-emption of the inevitable mental lapses that may lead me back down the rabbit hole. The tools primarily support this aspect, making it as hard as possible to fall for my brain's tricks, maximising the starting energy required to take any action that past me knew would be bad for present me.

boring phone - monkey brain no want

My phone is dull. It's boring af. No app icons, no entertainment apps at all, red-tape everywhere stopping me doing anything that could be construed entertainment. This makes my inner chimp very much disinterested in interacting with my phone as it is no longer always the shiniest, loudest thing in the room.

the tools

There exist many tools that claim to help reduce phone usage. I've had mixed experiences with many of them, similar to the issue of the in-app timers on instagram etc., wherein they are too easy for my monkey brain to quickly learn to bypass them and I'm back to relying on willpower alone to stop myself using my phone.

However, I have accumulated a set of tools that I now use all the time and have allowed me to actualise the "tool not entertainment" ethos. These tools are all completely free to use and simple to set up.

NOTE: at time of writing I am using a google pixel 6 and I have only used the below tools on this device!

Lock Me Out android app

This is by far the best app I've ever used for reducing screen time and blocking apps. Some of my favourite features are:

• Completely blocking access to apps and websites
• Setting up different blocking patterns by groups of apps (e.g. no reading the news before 1pm)
• Very strict lockdown, bypass options only allow 30s every 30 minutes, rendering social media apps utterly useless
• Free! Like, totally free. There is a paid option but that actually seems worse to me as it allows you to bypass things for longer. Not sure who came up with that business model but I'm not going to complain.

OLauncher

This is a minimalist android launcher that turns all of your apps into text.

• Forces me to be more concious in which app I am using when I open my phone - I have to type most of the app name to get to it, requiring multiple thumb presses rather than just one or two.
• Make the phone much less flashy and garish - no more attention grabbing colours and icons.

screenshot of my very boring home screen

Brave Browser

My standard browser and go-to choice for years due to built-in privacy features and ad-blocking.

• Able to disable javascript for websites such as YouTube. This is a pain to undo and really helps stop me in my tracks when accidentally mindlessly wandering the internet.
• Chromium-based so can use all chrome store extensions (see below)

Web Site Blocker

• Simple, straightforward and unlimited site blocking tool - no paying for blocking > 3 websites like most other stupid extensions.
• Password locking - once I've set my sites to block I add a random password that I don't record. I can no longer edit the site blocker and the annoyance of having to set it all up again after un-installing and re-installing completely prevents me from bypassing unless I really have to.

misc phone tools

honorary mention to the following common tools:

• Google pixel wellbeing app - a little clunky but easy way to track your usage if you wanna gamify things (not my cup of tea but works for others).
• Bedtime mode - black & white on all the time makes my phone so boring it's ridiculous.
• Do not disturb - on the pixel you can set this to turn on by default when your phone is face down, which is how I always leave my phone unless I'm waiting for messages.