Low-fone February
17 February 2024
"Low fone February" is what I'm calling my effort this month to try and use my phone a bit less. The alliteration makes it fun, and the goal is to steadily push my time spent staring into my phone screen down over the course of the month. It's kind of like a new years' resolution except I finally worked up the motivation to do it this month.
Here are ways I'm trying to reduce my phone-staring habits.
Consciously use the phone less.
This seems obvious but it's part of the point of having a month-themed goal. Ultimately, for the experiment to succeed this will have to be the bedrock it rests on. For the past couple weeks, I know if I'm sitting on the couch, in bed, at the coffee machine, etc. – I don't want to have my phone out.
Removed Firefox from my home screen.
I already don't have any social media apps on my phone, so any mindless scrolling I do is via web browser. After I removed the browser from my home screen, the extra effort to open the app drawer and scroll to the Firefox icon is a nudge to remind me that I'm making an effort to do that less. Of course, I can still load up any webpages I need to. After making this change, I was surprised how often I reflexively tapped on the app I moved into Firefox's place – my note taking/todo application.
(A bit more radical) I turned my phone screen black and white.
Android has a setting to control the color displayed on your screen for accessibility, and one of these options is "Grayscale". I read about this online in threads discussing reducing phone use, and it's a pretty interesting concept. After I enabled this setting I didn't notice much difference, until I turned it back off for a moment to look at a color picture – wow! The UI elements in so many aspects of Android applications are full of different color. Everything suddenly seemed more bright and busy. In grayscale, it's much more like a Kindle: calm, quiet, subdued. And I can always use Android's quick setting to turn color on for a moment, if I need to.
Why?
I've been increasingly unsettled by the dependency with which we carry and use smartphones. I don't just mean depending on them as tools for navigation and communication, because they are genuinely useful for that. It is the entertainment aspect that bothers me. We fill time on our phones whenever there is a single empty moment: the phones come out, automatically, ready to serve up novelties.
I don't think this is healthy in the long term. Like junk food, the type of thing we read on mobile phones is quick and easy to digest, and ultimately unsatisfying. You can always eat another and never feel full. A little junk food here and there is okay, but being conscious of this and watching myself use my phone I have become convinced that using phones this way is a net negative.
I want my phone to be a tool that works for me and not the other way around.
How is it going so far?
Being halfway though the month I have had mixed results. Some days I have been quite proud to leave my phone alone for hours at a time without realizing it, at work and at home. This feels great. Moments of boredom where I would have checked the front page of Hacker News or Reddit now are replaced by thinking or chatting with people nearby.
The change in mental feedback for this "dead time" is important to me. With my headspace not occupied by novelties, I can think more clearly about short-term and long-term problems and goals. It takes time for the mind to relax and thoughts to surface. Constantly filling that space with phone time all but guarantees that won't happen.
On the other hand, not every day is such a success. I think this really gets to the attractive power of novel information. For example, yesterday my phone recorded three hours of screen on time. Three hours is 1/5 or so of the waking day! Picturing myself sitting for three hours straight, staring into my phone is what really drives it home for me. That's not how I want to live my life!
Conclusions
I think everyone should try this for at least a week. This is not a new concept, and plenty of people have written about it before. There is a real value in being "bored" and letting your thoughts take their own course rather than be directed by algorithmically-driven feeds or the latest sensational news. It's a good exercise if only to reset and re-evaluate your relationship with your phone, even if you don't stick with it.
Since we're only halfway through the month I will come back and update this post in March. There are still a couple more weeks left!