Boring Phone
Semi-Smart Phone Challenges
I bought a Light Phone a while back. I wanted to ditch my iPhone without losing the necessities: touch screen keyboard, GPS navigation, music, and podcasts. I came crawling back several weeks later, mainly for RCS messaging (wasn't receiving most group chat messages).
New mission: make the iPhone boring.
Goals
After reactivating my iPhone, full of righteous anger, I set out to make it less smart evil-attention-vampire and more utilitarian, like the pocket-sized personal computer it deserves to be. There are paid apps like minimalist phone designed to achieve the same goal, but you don't need to pay someone else a monthly fee to protect you from yourself. You can DIY this using stock iOS settings in <1 hour.
Boring iPhone goals:
- Minimize distractions
- Minimize eye strain
- Set hard functional limits
Minimize distractions
- Remove most apps from home screen
- Disable most notifications
- Remove or limit web browsing
Minimize eye strain
- Use grayscale color filters
- Use night shift from sunset to sunrise
Set hard functional limits
- Delete social media apps
- Delete shopping apps
- Restrict apps available at night