Transcription
This is what my minimalistic phone setup looks like. It's designed to minimize distractions as much as possible, mimic the layout and design of a dumb phone, but still retain the useful features of a smartphone.
The first time I saw one of these dumb phones, I fantasized about the idea of getting one. But if you watch any video of somebody using these, you'll quickly find that they always go back to using their smartphones. And it's obvious why. Checking in at the airport, scanning a QR code for the menu at a restaurant, or even like going to Disneyland these days require you to have a smartphone. It's very difficult to operate in today's world without a modern smartphone, and you can use a dumb phone, but you're probably not going to have a good time with doing that.
Earlier this year, I did an experiment where I tried to minimize my screen time as much as possible for 30 days. I ended up averaging like 15 to 20 minutes a day only. But what I learned from that was what were the truly essential features that I needed on my phone, and what features were purely a distraction. And so after that, I set out to make my smartphone into a dumb phone, and this is the setup that I came up with.
If you've ever thought about using a dumb phone and you currently use a smartphone, then I think you're going to find this video super valuable. Personally, I use an iPhone, so this is a setup that I'm going to be focusing on. But I'm going to show you how I set everything up, all the systems I have in place, so even if you have an Android, you should still be able to set up the same system.
On my lock screen, I have a quote, my goal before the end of the year, and my calendar, so what I have to work on next. So this is what it looks like on the homepage. What I found is that the layout of my phone when I first unlock it really affects uh the apps that I open up. So I only put the apps that I want to use right in front of me, and so it's almost like a cue for me to use them. So there are like books, audiobooks, uh messaging apps, my workout tracker, maps, and notes, and that's pretty much it. Uh, when I had regular app icons and notification badges everywhere, it was a lot harder to focus, and whenever I opened my phone, there would be a lot of different things trying to pull in my attention.
The idea with everything here is that once you set up a system like this on your phone, it makes it really hard to not use your phone as a purely utilitarian device. I probably use like audiobooks and books the most when I'm just like in line or trying to listen to something. I find that with doing this, it's pretty easy to finish about one to two books a week just with like any off time I have using my phone. Messaging apps, I really wish this was one messaging app. My workout app. Maps. For a while, I was like trying to memorize all the street names where I live, but that didn't end up too well, so I still use maps. And I have just notes for anything I want to jot down.
So on the top here, I actually have a hidden widget for some apps that I want to look at without clicking in. So I have like my Whoop analytics. So this is my fitness tracker. It tells me like how well I slept and how much I should exercise for the day, and I also have my sleep stages from my Oura. And I can just tap to go into the app, so I don't need to actually have it on my home screen. And I also have one more widget where I can put in any text and reminders that I want to have. So like this is totally modifiable. I can say anything. So I can just keep any one of these up here if I want to, like anything I want to remember. Uh, by default, it's just the date.
On the bottom, I do have one app in the dock, and this is just a mood tracker. I talked about this in a previous video, but I use this to log how I feel. It's like super easy to use. If you just do this a couple times a day, at the end of the month, it gives you analytics, better mood, like how the weather affected it, how much your sleep affected it, your workout, uh, who you were with. So I think this app is super interesting. And if I scroll to the left, I have a habit tracker. For a while, I was tracking a bunch of different habits, but now, uh, I only track the habits I want to do every single day because it's a lot more motivating to see a streak that I don't want to break, and it's also easier to just remember.
And now I want to talk about the blocks that I've set up on my phone to make it impossible to be distracted. Yeah, I pretty much can't access any social media. So this is what it says. All right. But even with this setup, when I didn't have any blocks in place, like I didn't block any social media apps, it was still really easy to fall into the trap of searching up the YouTube app and then just watching YouTube for a couple hours. So this really all fell into place until after I set up a blocking system, which is pretty simple.
The first thing is that I block social media apps on my phone for the entire day, except for the hours of 6:00 to 7:00. And this is just based on the times that I know that I want to be focusing on other things, because those are the times that I can focus the best, and I want to make sure I'm not wasting those hours being distracted with my phone. I've tried this out for a while now, and I think this is a pretty sustainable and realistic setup because if you just block it entirely, you might be tempted to find ways to skirt that. But if you just know that there is a time coming up, and now is not the time to check social media yet, then it's a lot easier to sustain this habit. Uh, I read an article that said like in China, for students, the government limits their time on TikTok to only 60 minutes a day. And for me, that's probably like the maximum that I want to be spending using social media on my phone every day.
For emergencies, like the app that I use for the blocks, you can actually take a break, but there is a time you have to wait, an amount of time before you can take a break, and every time you take a break, you have to wait longer to take another break. So it's really difficult to just use your phone mindlessly. But for the blocks, obviously, this includes all the social media platforms, like, like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. But I've also just added to the list of apps that I blocked based on what I noticed that I would be distracting myself with, like the App Store, or even google.com. I blocked it because I'll be looking at stuff like celebrity net worth, or just like reading articles, even though like I didn't want to actually be doing that.
My goal is pretty much to make my phone as minimalistic and as utilitarian as possible. So I want to have like the lean functionality of a dumb phone, but only the good features of a smartphone that I still want to have. Now, when I have like anything I want to look up or any quick questions, I just use my voice assistant, Siri, and it gives me the answer really quickly.
I've watched a lot of videos on YouTube talking about how to reduce your screen time, and a lot of times they talk about, you know, journaling or meditation and reflecting on why you use your phone that much. I think that can work, but for me, there was nothing more effective than actually just setting up a system like this and making it impossible to be distracted on my phone. Like the way I see it is kind of like having, you know, Coke on your table and trying to figure out how to not get addicted to Coke. Like the solution is just to not have it on your table.
For notifications, I keep it pretty simple. I pretty much only allow messages to come through. I really hate it when apps send me like promotional stuff or reminders. So whenever they do that, I just block notifications completely for the app.
I also have this shortcut on my phone that I want to show you, um, which is like if you, if I triple click it, it becomes all red. This basically just acts to remove all the blue light from my phone, so that at night, if I'm like reading a book or I'm messaging somebody, I won't have like all the blue light from my phone. You can also do grayscale.
But before I explain like how I set everything up, if you want to do the same thing, I want to talk about like why I even do this because you might say that if you're easily distracted with your phone, it's a symptom of something else. Like I was having a discussion the other day, and somebody suggested that just from personal experience, if you block everything and you set up a system where it's very difficult to use social media, you're not going to use social media. And so for me, it has been an effective solution, and the entire time that I've set this up, I haven't had that issue anymore.
Like as bigger phones come out and more addictive games come on the market, and all new designs that's simply gorgeous, I feel like you have to set more constraints to protect your attention. Most of these companies that are developing these apps are literally trying to make it as appealing as possible for you to use it as much as possible. If there are no restrictions, then it's very likely that you're going to succumb to using it for the entire day.
The beauty of a smartphone compared to a dumb phone is that you can make so many adjustments and modifications to your liking and add and remove different features. Like maybe you only want to block social media in the mornings and unlock everything at night. But I think like it's just worth setting up some constraints or being intentional about how you set up the layout on your phone so that you are only using your phone for the reasons that you actually want to be.
But uh, yeah, with this setup, I think it's actually better than using a dumb phone because I can still like scan QR codes, use the camera, even use my phone to make payments with Apple Pay. I just think it's way more realistic to use a smartphone in the modern world than to actually downgrade to a dumb phone.
But yeah, if you want to set everything up in the same way, here's all the apps that you use for this list of apps versus an icon. So to change your app icons to just a list like this, it's an app called um Blank Spaces, and you can pretty much like make modifications to like, um, how many apps you want, like different fonts, different font colors. You just use a wallpaper to blend in the widget so you can't tell, and it's a widget on top as well.
For the text widget that you can put in your home screen or your lock screen, this one's called Any Text, and to change the text, you just have to click it and you can type anything you want. For the widget, this is called Habit Kit, and this app is called How We Feel. For the block, I use an app called Opal. Like this one is a paid app, but I think it's definitely worth it. You can set a schedule, you can set time limits for certain apps, and you can also make it so you can't modify any of the schedules. At least for me, like when I know that I can't access it or it's like too tedious for me to skirt it, I just end up not being distracted by my phone and I don't think about it.
Yeah, that's pretty much it, uh, for my minimalistic phone. I hope this was pretty helpful. If you want to do a similar setup, I also have a setup to minimize distractions on my computer that is a little bit different because I actually do work on my computer. So if you're interested, let me know and I can make a video about that. But in the meantime, you might want to check out this other video where I broke down an alternative method to reduce your screen time and gain back your focus. So if you're interested, you can check out that video here, and I'll see you over there.
[Music] Peace.