Today, I’m embarking on a 30 day experiment to see if I can live (and do my job) in the modern world without a smartphone.
Why?
I’ve been a tech enthusiast all my life: always had to have the latest, greatest, newest, and shiniest gadget I could afford. Here lately, it feels like the tech is taking over and just making me miserable. “Always connected”, notification fatigue, endless doom scrolling, "download our app for [super basic thing that shouldn’t require an app], etc. I love my smartphone, but I feel like it’s a “ball and chain” that’s causing me unneeded stress.
I’ve been wanting to try this for some time, but the “killer app”, so to speak, on my smartphone is hospot mode. I use that heavily for both work and personal use, and I only recently realized that modern “dumb” phones could do that now. Suddenly this experiment became possible, so I bought a cheap dumb phone and decided to give it a try.
So, can I go 30 days without a smartphone, and will I see any quality of life improvements (or perhaps the opposite)? Only one way to find out.
Conditions of the experiment:
I bought a modern-era “dumb” flip phone and moved my SIM to it yesterday evening. It’s not a true “dumb” phone, though. It runs a stripped down version of Android, so I’m able to install a few “must have” apps that I need such as my MFA and credit union app. I made a concession with the banking app since the closest branch office is 45 minutes away (I don’t consider the MFA app to be a concession since some of the dumber dumb phones had support for at least TOTP generators).
That’s it for the apps. No email, IM/chat apps, web browser, etc (though I can run all of those it seems). The only “apps” will be the ones that would be standard for a dumb phone of the mid 2000s (calendar, camera, alarm, music player, etc). I’ve already connected it over USB and loaded up era-appropriate music from my local collection 😆
Rules:
- I’ll allow myself to carry my smartphone (w/o SIM card) in my bag, powered off, in case I do need it for something urgent, but I won’t carry it on my person or use it beyond immediate need. Will connect to my “dumb” phone via its hotspot for internet.
- If I do need to break out the old smart rectangle, I should look to see if there is a way to accomplish what I need without it.
- This experiment cannot interfere with my job duties.
- I’ve setup an SMS bridge on my server to forward certain critical alerts. I used to do this back when all phones were dumb phones, so I don’t feel it’s breaking the spirit of the experiment. These will only be “the datacenter is on fire” level alerts, so I don’t anticipate many (or any).
So, here goes. I’m not sure what to expect or how this will turn out and even less sure I’ll make it the full 30 days. Wish me luck.
I did the same for about 6 months, but I went with an actual dumb phone, a Nokia 225.
It was interesting, and the things I missed the most from a smartphone were def. not what I expected:
Replaced all the media stuff with an iPod which worked shockingly well for podcasts, audiobooks, and music, though I did build a little bit of automation to download and convert youtube videos to a format the iPod would play.
Beyond that, it was just what you’d expect: no apps, and no distractions.
I’m feeling the opposite lol. I’m preferring the T9 (or more often, just tapping out messages letter by letter) to the on-screen keyboard I gave up. Mostly I think I just missed physical keys, lol, but I’ll take what I have. Took me a bit to get back in the swing of it (it’s been a decade and half), but the muscle memory is coming back.
The music player on here is decent enough, and I threw in a 32 GB SD card I had lying around, and that’s working pretty well (hooked right up to my car’s bluetooth).
But yeah, I’m trying to work toward true dumb phone, but for now, I’ve dumbed down a dumb smart phone to a pretty close approximation haha.
The problem I ran into was the dictionary: T9 will let me text the BF and ask him to bring home milk no problem. It’s noticeably less useful when I need to tell someone to use systemd to restart a service, and afaik there’s no good way to expand the dictionary on at least that specific phone, so it was kind of a slog half the time vs being able to just… type out what you needed to send.
It’d do media playback, but not in any format I’d reasonably want to listen to (no flac? for shame!) and rockbox on an iPod did, so that’s mostly the driver behind that choice.