#i would like to have a dumb or dumbish phone and a blog

[stalactites]

by the end of the year! no social media for me...

[davidriddell]

The perils of smartphone life (and how I thought about avoiding it)

A very stressful period of my life (culminating in some time off work) led me to have a think about the various stresses I have and how life used to be a lot simpler. Years ago I used to carry a book around with me, write in the paper journal that I had in my bag, make lists on various post it notes. It just seemed easier than when I have two phones vibrating in my pocket (work and personal), with multiple communication channels on each,  and seem to feel the need to take out my phone whenever I have a moment. After having a few days break I noticed that I had been ignoring notifications and just swiping them away, letting my email build up and processing messages that weren’t important in batches (because how many messages that we receive are actually important?). So this led me to wonder if life without a smartphone might actually be easier.

When I first started work there wasn’t email (although it arrived pretty soon after) and there certainly wasn’t the incessant number of emails that I seem to get just now. I may write another blog post about work email culture and the fact that sending an email is often a brilliant way to get something off your to do list and onto someone else’s but it’d be digressing from the point just now.

Back in the day (around 2000) I had what, at the time, was my ultimate mobile phone, the mighty 8210. With a 650mAh battery (less than a sixth the size of most modern smartphones) it lasted a few days without charge easily and fitted very nicely in a pocket. Yes making calls on it was an exercise in avoiding hand cramp and it lacked any features that we’d expect nowadays but it worked, was perfectly acceptable for calls and you could send texts (remember when an unlimited text package was quite the contract feature).

Whilst I’d love to go back to something like that for just carrying around, most of my communication is on WhatsApp rather than text now so I’d just be cutting myself off from the benefits of (a limited number of) group chats. So what’s the answer for me? I figured that it may be a lower spec smartphone than I’d normally have, probably with a 5” screen or less, and a massive battery (>4000mAh ideally but 3000mAh may work) that had a limited number of apps installed. My vision was essentially a dumb phone but with WhatsApp - what I started calling a ‘dumbish’ phone. I’d get all the benefits of a modern phone (WhatsApp, camera, calendar) but with none of the distractions. I’d also buy a tablet, preferably with a pen, that I could use for email, Twitter etc. and tether to the phone when necessary. I figured that it would all cost about the same as a smartphone replacement (in my world that’s around £500 - 600).

So where did I get to with this? Whilst there were a lot of positives in my mind (and in others after reading some blogs) there were also downsides. The positives mainly revolved around a lack of distraction, beginning to take focussed time to deal with email and social media, and living more in the moment. But the negatives started to mount up:

The number of apps that I’d want on the phone started to increase. For example Spotify, a podcast app, maps, Instagram (makes it easier to post images)...

I actually use my phone a lot to pay for parking so I’d need to carry around  lot more change (remember how much of a pain that was, particularly for work expensed parking?)

What about loyalty cards? I’d need to revive the little card carrier for those.

What 5” phones are there actually for sale nowadays? Maybe I didn’t have that good a look but I didn’t see many (that weren’t bloatware ridden Samsungs anyway)

Looking at the costs it’d work out quite expensive. For a decent 10” tablet I’d be looking at £500ish, more if I wanted a pen. I have an expensive MacBook that I don’t use enough so I’d struggle to justify around £1000 for the Google Pixel Slate.

An incidental finding from my research: I wanted to stay Android as but I’ll give it to Apple that they have cornered the market for a small phone and a combatively inexpensive tablet that work well together. But I have a very old iPad so have used iOS and just couldn’t face learning a new ecosystem.

So what was the conclusion of my thinking about this? Basically it all just seems a lot of money for very little benefit. Financially I’d be better keeping my current phone going for a while longer and then just replacing it with a not huge but decent smartphone. The big conclusion was that what I needed to do was to turn off all unnecessary notifications to minimise the distractions - pretty much everything aside from WhatsApp, texts and phone calls. I’ll carry around a paper notebook and write in it and set aside some focussed time for dealing with email (I already try to do this at work so why not at home?). Also I’ll carry around my MacBook when I am planning on doing some writing and try to not spend my time trying to do stuff on a 5.5” screen.

Time for a new phone is due in a couple of months so we can see how i get on until then. A delayed GWR train on Saturday evening gave me time to turn off all the app notifications and, three days in, it all seems to be working. I guess I’ll find out!