Journey away from smartphones
A New York Times article about Luddite teens who rejected their smartphones made me reflect on my own journey away from smartphones and the complexities of discerning how to adopt transformative technology in our lives. In this conclusion to the series, I highlight key learnings and realizations throughout the the year, including how the project changed my life for the better.
Luddite teens
Last week, the New York Times published an article titled Luddite Teens Don’t Want Your Likes,” which brought back nostalgic memories for me of the six weeks I spent without a smartphone. As I read the article, I began to trace back in my mind why I returned to using my smartphone and if I should go back to living without it. The article begins:
On a brisk recent Sunday, a band of teenagers met on the steps of Central Library on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn to start the weekly meeting of the Luddite Club, a high school group that promotes a lifestyle of self-liberation from social media and technology. As the dozen teens headed into Prospect Park, they hid away their iPhones — or, in the case of the most devout members, their flip phones, which some had decorated with stickers and nail polish.
… [One club member comments:] When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed …. I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now.
The club founder, Logan Lane, explains how Instagram made her feel bad about herself, so she first deleted the app, then put her phone in a box. With her phone locked away, life opened up all around her:
For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal.
I, too, fantasized about throwing my smartphone into a canal. And I did give my smartphone up for six weeks, but then returned. Reading this article, I started to think back on my journey. What happened?
I have already recounted the story of returning to my smartphone in Six weeks in — returning to smartphone (but not as before). The killer app of smartphones is not an app at all — it’s the full-screen keyboard, which allows you to text. Without the ability to text, I couldn’t communicate much with my wife and other family members. Email is pre-Jurassic, and frequently ignored. Without text, you can still talk on the phone, but phone conversations and voicemail are much less convenient, especially for quick notes to family members.
Texting can be a double-edged sword, though. On the one hand, it allows us to communicate quickly and easily through a screen-based keyboard. On the other, the same screen that enables this easy communication also gives us access to app interfaces and the vast amount of information on the Internet, all in the palm of our hand.
Another factor besides texting contributed to my decision to return to using a smartphone. Reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants convinced me that the constant introduction of new technologies is inevitable and that actively rejecting them is be akin to adopting the mindset described in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto.
I realized that I needed to find ways to make peace with technology and use it in a way that worked in my favor. So I switched the SIM card from my Kyocera basic phone back to my Pixel smartphone, and then modified my initial list of rules for personal technology use.
My modified rules worked well initially. But as I became more curious to pinpoint the precise element related to smartphones that pulled my attention away from books, I experimented with adding previously abandoned sites and practices back.
In the last couple of months, despite having removed all social media and news apps from my phone, I once again found myself checking sites (New York Times + ESPN + Feedly) on my smartphone frequently, such as before my experiment. How so, without apps? Well, even without apps, you can read most content just as easily from a web browser. Responsive design has gotten that good.
I also started checking both personal and work email on my phone. I found myself once again looking at email at any spare moment of my day — waiting in line for coffee, waiting for the elevator, in the bathroom, on the train, and so on. I felt bad about this, especially because I don’t even receive that many email messages. Yet I had already relearned to check my email and news every twenty minutes.
I also started backsliding against my 90-minute pomodoros, which had been the key to unlocking so much productivity. I told myself that I no longer needed them, that my focus on a task was fine even with small interruptions to check email, news, or more.
All the while, I started reading less and feeling more superficial, getting less done. What happened? Had I let the smartphone control my life again?
I avoided bringing my phone into my bedroom at night, but I would bring my laptop instead and get hooked on some mindless TV show. Or I’d wake up early, such as 4:30 am, and reach for my laptop (conveniently located under the bed) to continue the show. After all, what else can you do at 4:30 am when you can’t sleep?
I felt like a former alcoholic who had fallen off the wagon. I underestimated the insidiousness of the smartphone and Internet. I tried to remove both Chrome and Gmail but found that I can’t remove these apps, only disable them, so I did. I’m guessing that re-enabling them wouldn’t be that hard, but so far I’ve resisted figuring out how to do so. After all, I could easily just install another browser, so following some rules requires willpower.
Disabling these apps (Gmail and Chrome, specifically) made the smartphone more of a paperweight. Without these apps, the smartphone becomes useful only for a small number of functions. I deliberated about switching to the Light Phone but remembered that with the Kyocera, I spent a lot of time figuring out hacky workarounds for the functionality I needed (such as using srccpy, “screen copy,” to digitally mirror the phone on my computer so that I could text my wife).
Reading articles like I’m Gen Z, and I ditched my iPhone for the Light Phone II for a week reminded me of the cumbersome workarounds that come with abandoning a smartphone, which you realize little by little. The initial rush of abandoning these technologies is quickly replaced by the inability to perform basic tasks. For example, want to listen to Audible, check the weather, rent a Lime scooter, create a hotspot, join a Zoom meeting during your commute, view your work calendar, or find an unfamiliar address? The amount of time spent trying to replicate the convenient aspects of a smartphone can make it feel like the basic phone is more of a hindrance than a help.
I also remembered how easy it was to replace my smartphone with another form of distraction: streaming media. Without some willpower to resist distraction (whether in the form of smartphones, TV shows, sports, or other), trying to abandon my smartphone for a basic phone was a losing battle. I could simply substitute the smartphone’s distraction with something else, and did.
At any rate, finding the right balance (whether using a basic phone, smartphone, or some stripped-down middle-ground) is a learning process. Disabling Chrome and Gmail apps seemed to be just what I needed. Over the course of a week, I stopped checking my email so frequently — and more importantly, I stopped thinking about my email. One morning I woke up, walked down the stairs to my computer, and worked on a post for an hour without thinking to check email. (Normally it’s the first thing I check upon waking.)
I also doubled down on my bedroom technology use: no more bringing my laptop or smartphone to my bed, which only prompts me to watch streaming media until I fall asleep (or to watch it if I wake up early). Instead, I brought in a book. Reading it for 30 minutes put my mind into a slumber.
The more I read, the more progress I made in books. And that progress gave me more momentum to keep reading. It didn’t take long before I found once more thinking about the ideas in the book more than a TV show or email. (Our brain really is plastic and can easily be reshaped.)
In trying to restore the balance of technology use, I didn’t realize how delicate my rules are. Simply having the ability to check email and news on my phone seemed enough to imprison me again (is it the Dopamine hit during a time of boredom?). Removing those apps lifted the burden and prompted me to do more reading.
My smartphone still sits on my desk, like an ominous Pandora’s box. Without the apps, I’ve neutered it.
I do find myself looking at my smartphone now and then and wondering what the device is for. It’s obviously underperforming its capability, like having a Lamborghini that you use only to drive to the mailbox and back. But just as with any sports car, can you really drive it without occasionally accelerating well past the speed limit?
Did I achieve the end goal of the experiment?
I relate the above only to be realistic and honest about my relationship with the smartphone and technology. It’s not as if one can easily walk away, form a Luddite club, and get immersed in the classics for ever more. Life is more complicated, especially if you work in tech and have family and friends with smartphones. The only feasible path, in my experience, is to find a way to neutralize the addictive elements of the smartphone.
For me, this meant disabling email and news mechanisms. (Almost no one is addicted to checking the weather on their phones, or setting alarms all day.) I’ve never been much of an Instagram or Facebook user, and Twitter lost its appeal long before Elon Musk took over. Each person has their own kryptonite, so what might be Instagram for one person (like Logan Lane in the Luddite Club) could be a news or email app for another. (My kids check their email once a week, if that.) By neutralizing my phone, I have figuratively moved away from it while still interacting and participating in modern life and maintaining social relationships.
Overall achievements
Despite the ups and downs of my experiment in moving away from smartphones, I have achieved and learned so much through this series. In this final post, I hope to wrap up and form a conclusion about it all.
In my second post, My initial rules and reasons for intentional smart phone use, I listed the these goals for my experiment:
What do I hope to achieve by removing smartphones?
- Long-form attention to read a book without my mind wandering
- Sleep through the night without randomly waking early
- Have more mental energy in the evenings
- Get into periods of flow and become more productive at work
- Have more peace of mind
- Have more realizations from reflection
- Be more present with other people
Definitely, both literally and figuratively abandoning my smartphone has achieved every one of these goals. I won’t go through each one in detail, but overall, it’s a resounding yes. Instead of commenting on each of these high-level goals, I’ll call out more concrete highlights from the series.
Productivity
Of all the techniques for productivity, the 90-minute focus sessions work the best for me. I’m still amazed by how much I can accomplish in 90 minutes when I focus on a task, not being pulled away into anything else. I even sometimes measure out work by the number of 90-minute focus sessions I think the task will take.
Although it can be hard to focus for that long, I’m in love with the productivity outcomes, the ability to knock out a big documentation project seemingly in an afternoon, or to write a lengthy post in a single evening. The productivity method makes me think I can accomplish nearly any amount of work.
The technique has some tradeoffs, such as ignoring the world around me for a bit. But if I wait to check email and other sites between focus sessions only, the method works. Ninety minutes is enough to get some serious velocity going. The only drawback is that if I only have 30 minutes of time until a meeting, I sometimes feel that starting a focus session isn’t worthwhile.
Reading
Reading! If there’s one major reward for neutralizing my smartphone, it’s the return to reading. I don’t remember reading so many books in my life, not since college. The smartphones and Internet have prompted a gradual, incremental transition from reading print to online media. At some point during the past 20 years, books became something I stopped consuming (except for audiobooks to listen to while commuting).
In returning to books, I realized that I love reading. A good book can change your perspective in transformational ways. Reading feels enriching, soothes my brain waves, helps me understand topics at deeper levels, and makes me more informed, especially when I write.
I’ve learned that for me, print books are superior to anything on a screen. This might be due partly to my declining eyesight. (I now carry two sets of glasses — one for driving, one for computer.) But I also like annotating books with a pen as I read. It makes me feel like an active reader. I’ve grown accustomed to reading each morning while sipping a caramel latte (my espresso favorite).
At work, I’ve been running a book club focused on the automotive and transportation industry. I’m also reading long documents at my work (whether product requirements, engineering designs, or other documents that others usually just glance at). Yes, I print them out and have a stapler at my desk. The other day, a neighboring engineer heard the sound of a stapler and perked up, noting that he hasn’t heard the sound of a stapler for years.
Writing
I’ve learned a lot about writing as well this past year. If you remember, I started this Journey away from Smartphones series as a writing experiment. Could I write a book by creating it chapter by chapter with new posts? It seems that the answer is most likely yes. I still need to read the series from end to end to see if it works as a whole, so the verdict is still pending. (Will it be coherent, or scattered?)
Either way, I’ve enjoyed having a sustained focus throughout the year. I plan to live my life like this: picking a couple of topics every year and writing enough about them to assemble a 200-page themed essay collection at the end. I now need to go back through the former posts and clean them up, edit them, address knowledge gaps, and more.
Additionally, I learned that writing is a conversation with the texts you’re reading. Previously, I approached writing primarily by following a technique of asking 20 questions about the topic and trying to answer them — going through this round of questioning multiple times. While this brainstorming technique still works, it’s not as powerful as finding a relevant author to read and then summarizing, commenting, and building off of those ideas. Writing is a conversation you’re having with the books you’re reading.
Writing is also an experience in living. In my view, it makes little sense to explore a topic that doesn’t matter deeply to me, and which doesn’t involve incorporating any changes into my life. In the books I read, I like to see the author personally invested, trying things out, experimenting with changes. Although essays are good reads, when the author injects personal experience and brings me on a personal quest (like Johann Hari did in Stolen Focus), it makes the writing much more engaging.
This approach of balancing ideas with personal experience is perhaps the only way to compensate for the lack of deep scholarly expertise about topics. I might not know every study that’s been done to prove or disprove whether smartphones actually create digital dementia (use a term from Jeff Krinnock and Matt Hoff in May I Ask a Technical Question), but when I bring my own life experiments to the table, this sense of active living and experimenting seems to provide authenticity and intrigue to the content, which adds value.
On a more practical level, I also realized one technique that works well for documentation projects: alternating modes between reading and writing. I devote one focus session to reading and gathering nuggets of information, especially in areas where it’s thin. Then I devote the next focus session to smoothing out and integrating the information. This switching back and forth between reading and writing makes creating documentation a lot easier.
Admittedly, my API documentation course suffered a bit this past year because I didn’t focus much on it. But these series are the kind of content I want to write. I figure I only have about 30 years of writing left in me. Before I become a wrinkly old man with declining memory and cognition, I’d like to sink my energy into the type of content I want to write. (That said, I do plan to refresh and update many parts of my API documentation course next year.)
I initially thought that focusing on a topic tangential to tech comm might turn readers off, but not so. Readership has remained about the same, as most of us are in the same technology boat, struggling with the cognitive dissonance of living and working in tech while questioning its impact on our lives.
Television
During this series, I realized that streaming media (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) can take the place of a smartphone. Although we’ve all heard the advice of not taking devices into the bedroom (to promote good sleep hygiene), I had previously ignored that advice. I learned that the advice should be followed. The more I propped my laptop on my chest as I reclined on my bed, the fewer books I read, and the later I stayed up. Staying up later meant getting worse sleep the next morning, which then led to more caffeine and more distractibility. At one point I even got “caffeinism” (and learned to limit my lattes to just two per day).
Watching TV in the family room (rather than on a personal laptop in bed) also promotes TV as a social experience with family members. The TV brings us together on the couch as we comment and interact about the show. Even a bad TV show can be fun to watch with the right people. I’m currently watching “Business Proposal,” a Korean drama, with one of my daughters who wants to be an exchange student in Japan, and it’s fun to see her excitement and point of view about the content.
I also replaced the the phone-as-alarm-clock model in my bedroom. I love the old-school 1980s GE alarm clock I purchased (which you can only buy on eBay now). The idea of putting a screen-based digital assistant (Alexa Show or similar) on my nightstand seems counter-intuitive to a device-free bedroom. I also like looking at the red numbers on my old-school alarm clock, its only real function is to make an alarm sound (or play bad FM radio). The old-school alarm clock is a constant reminder of my childhood and the days before the Internet.
Wayfinding
Wayfinding also proved to be a breakthrough for me this year. As I learned to navigate without any GPS navigation apps (at least around my home city), I actually figured out where things are! I know it sounds trivial, but it felt so good to be fully focused and immersed on the road rather than beholden to the micro directions of my smartphone. I understand (more or less) the logic of avenues versus streets, the numbering, and how to get around. Having a mental map of the roads helps me feel more comfortable and certain as I drive.
I still use my phone for podcasts and music, but I try to avoid using GPS as much as I can, recognizing that if I navigate on my own, the route sticks in my mind much better. For trips outside of my home area, or emergencies or other spontaneous needs, or if I simply get lost, I’ll open up the app, but not if I can help it.
I thought I would navigate via paper maps (and bought a handful), but not really. I usually just study the route ahead of time on Google Maps on my laptop and sometimes make a few notes on paper.
For 20 years of marriage, my wife has made fun of my navigational impairment. Not so much anymore! Sometimes I raise an eyebrow when I see her type in a direction on her map that I know how to get to.
Has this navigational certitude given way to increased memory for episodic events? I’m not sure. I don’t have too many moments of brain fog, but I haven’t tried to measure my memory skills. Given how much time we spend driving, though, making the switch away from GPS navigation apps proved more fulfilling than I initially thought. It’s an easy way to push back against automation with the machine, to get your brain’s wayfinding gears turning.
Cyber skepticism
This year I’ve also realized that I’m more of a cyber skeptic than I realized. Throughout my 20-year career in tech, I’ve always been excited to work on the frontiers of tech, seeing new technologies and applications as the next step forward. I was always a gadget/device person, someone who esteems innovation and who occasionally geeks out with some new website approach (for example, Docs as Code).
This year my enthusiasm for tech waned a bit. I started to realize that I longed to revert to a world before smartphones. I’m not a hardcore cyber skeptic (for example, I still can’t stomach Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, and I kind of don’t mind being tracked), but I’m long past the idea that all tech is beneficial. As we have witnessed, so much of social media can be toxic, proliferating extremism, disinformation, and division. We now have wacky conspiracy theorists (Q, R) floating around with an astounding number of followers, and family members have become divided by red vs. blue team ideologies. The list goes on.
I’m not exactly sure how much of a cyber skeptic I’ll become. I no longer foresee purchasing any more digital assistants. The overall internet is still wonderful, in my view. It’s given me a space to write and publish, and an audience. It has also opened up infinite resources for knowledge consumption. Many other technologies (including Google Maps, which I explore all the time on my computer) have opened up new possibilities to explore the spaces around me. But more and more, I’m learning to be more discerning about which technology to adopt and how to incorporate it.
Years earlier, tech seemed so innocent, so benign. I’ve now adopted more of a “Whig mentality of history,” as Krinnock and Hoff say, which is to assume all technological innovation leads to progress. Not so much now. The way smartphones suck everyone’s attention at any spare moment can be startling. If someone were transported from the 1980s to the present and observed how ubiquitous and attention-demanding smartphones are, they would be shocked. (Incrementalism obscures the social changes.)
As a partial cyber skeptic, I’ve sometimes wondered about the value of the documentation I’m producing at work. Would the world be better off without the work I do today? I’d never asked that before. One passage in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus book occasionally haunts me:
One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: “How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?” There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.
In conversations with my kids, they likewise fantasize about living during a time before the internet. Me too.
Despite the cognitive dissonance of working for big tech, I also marvel to see what new wonders technology will introduce, such as with generative AI. In reading May I Ask a Technical Question?, which has a heavy cyber-skeptic bias, I realized that I’m not fully in that cyber-skeptic camp. I’m in more of a middle ground between cyber-skeptic and cyber-optimist, which gives me a great vantage point as a writer.
Camera
I haven’t written much about using a regular camera instead of my smartphone camera. Part of my plan when I initially abandoned my smartphone was to figure out how to take pictures without a real camera. Although I experimented briefly with a compact point-and-shoot, I ended up returning it.
However, this year I volunteered as a photographer for my daughter’s soccer team. I dusted off an old Nikon D60 DSLR, bought a zoom lens, learned a bit about shutter speeds and aperture, and have been taking action photos at soccer games all year. It’s been a lot of fun, actually.
In doing sports photography, which almost invariably requires a zoom lens, I have been relearning some photography skills that have mostly been latent since my days as a yearbook photographer during high school (back in 1993!). I often think that I should take up photography as a hobby more actively. For stills that don’t involve zooming, smartphone cameras are comparable if not better. But DSLR cameras also offer more opportunities when it comes to photography, especially with specialized lenses.
News
I still struggle with the news. Ever since reading Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News, I’m much more aware of the negativity bias of news. Another problem is that reading the news pulls me online, and once online, invites me to click elsewhere, making news more of a “gateway drug.” But when I stopped reading the news, I felt disconnected from global events. I was curious to know what was going on. So I started glancing through the New York Times summaries.
The problem with this approach (occasionally glancing through daily news summaries) is that I don’t want play-by-play summaries of breaking news but rather more general summaries of what’s going on at a higher level, which I can consume at a less regular cadence. I also want to read it offline. I once experimented with a print subscription to the New York Times but then realized that I don’t want to feel compelled to read the massive paper every day. Each newspaper has nearly a book’s worth of information.
There aren’t many summary print news sources (that I’m aware of), but I recently decided to get a print subscription to The Week, hopefully as a way of batching my news reading to a lazy weekend hour. I’m not looking for in-depth reporting to explore all sides of an issue; I mostly want the high-level gist of what’s going on, preferably batched into a weekly publication, and easily digestible. And I hope that reading offline will make me less prone to wandering online. We’ll see how it goes.
Revisiting my rules
In this series, I listed various technology rules that I would follow, which is what Cal Newport recommends. The technology rules we make for ourselves might require constant refinement until we get to the right mix of technology use. I started out with a strict set of initial rules only to modify them a bit later on. Below, I’ll provide yet another iteration.
Remember that what might work for one person might not make sense for another. My rules fit me, based on those apps that are my kryptonite, based on my social needs with my family, and my work. Here are my latest rules:
- Using a smartphone (instead of a basic phone) is all right as long as the distracting elements are neutralized (for example, remove Chrome, Gmail, News apps, etc.).
- Don’t take smartphones or laptops into bed. Take a book instead.
- Try to keep the phone in Do Not Disturb mode — disable app notifications and phone calls except for family and calendar apps.
- Get your primary news offline rather than online.
- Keep your email inbox light by unsubscribing to almost everything.
- Don’t rely on mapping applications when driving if you can help it. Learn the logic of the streets. (GPS can help, however, if you’re actively learning and exploring new areas.)
- Avoid using social media as entertainment. You can check it every so often to gather information, but generally, it’s not worthwhile.
- Leverage the smartphone as a utilitarian device, not as an infotainment device. It can be extremely helpful at times (like when renting an e-scooter or processing a Covid test).
- Approach tasks in 90-minute pomodoros. During the 90 minutes, don’t get pulled into distractions (such as email or news).
- When writing, alternate between reading and writing modes. Devote one session to reading, another to writing. The two modes build on each other.
Following my technology rules has led to an increase in my reading habits, and I find that my life is improved rather than diminished as a result.
Recommended reading list
Throughout this series, I’ve quoted and commented on many of the following books. If you’re interested in continuing this theme, I recommend reading the following:
- Stolen Focus, by Johan Hari
- Stop Reading the News, by Rolf Dobelli
- Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport
- Deep Work, by Cal Newport
- Wayfinding, by O’Connor, M. R.
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
- What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly
- Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- ADHD 2.0, by Ed Hallowell and John Ratey
You will soon find that there’s an abundance of books written about the themes I’ve touched on.
References
Krinnock, Jeff and Matt Hoff. May I Ask a Technical Question? Questions about digital reliability each of us should ask. 2016 Jeff Krinnock and Matt Hoff.
About Tom Johnson
I’m a technical writer / API doc specialist based in the Seattle area. In this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, visual communication, information architecture, writing techniques, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out simplifying complexity and API documentation for some deep dives into these topics. If you’re a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the field, be sure to subscribe to email updates. You can also learn more about me or contact me.
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