Ep. 396: Can I Learn To Love My Phone Again?

0:02Do you remember when the iPhone was first introduced? It was an exciting moment. Like, I want to play you a clip here from Steve Jobs' keynote address at the 2007 Macworld, where he first introduced this device. I want you to listen to the enthusiasm of the assembled crowd. Three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device.

1:03and we are calling it iPhone. Wow, those were the days. And then when we finally got our hands on those devices for the first time, they were everything we had hoped they would be. They were slick and easy to use, and they were super useful, and they were fun. But then, of course, over the years that followed, our relationship with the phones began to sour. Now, a big part of this is the attention economy platforms that realize there's money to be made in making us look at these screens longer and longer. So they built their contrived addictive apps, and soon we felt obsessed with our phones. But also it's just clutter.

1:46Over the years, we've added more and more different types of apps and services, some useful, some that we've forgotten, some that become habits, and some we wish we could get rid of. And now just the whole screen when we turn on that device is a multicolored, garish, distracting pile of exhaustion. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to the way we looked at our phones in 2007? Well, here's the thing. I think we can. In recent years, there's been a lot of interest in both the app space and the sort of strategy space in figuring out how to transform the actual setup of your phone so that it is much simpler and more fun, like the phones used to be when we first got them.

2:30And to do this without having to give up major functionality that still makes smartphones useful. I call this effort putting your phone into 2007 mode, and it's what I want to talk about today. So I have five big ideas I want to share, five practical ideas for transforming your existing phone into 2007 mode. The first four come from very popular videos online, and the fifth idea will be my own. Collectively, these present a possibility for a much healthier and more enjoyable relationship with your device, and let's be honest, we could all use that in our current moment. All right, so let's get into it.

3:07As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. and we'll get started right after the music.

3:31All right, so let's get into it with my first piece of advice for putting your phone into 2007 mode. This is probably the most drastic of the advice I'm going to suggest, so I want to start with it so we can really set the tone right. The idea here is to come completely transform the visual interface you use to interact with your apps. In particular, I want to talk about moving away from screens filled with brightly colored application icons to instead a monochromatic screen where your apps are listed in text. So you'll actually just see, for example, on a dark gray background in light gray text, messages the word messages maps the word maps weather the word weather and so on this type of interface was really first popularized by a feature phone known as the light phone which used an e-ink display like you would have on a kindle that really could only do monochromatic displays but people really enjoyed that and so there's been a a sort of renaissance in apps developed that you can run on a standard smartphone like an ios phone or an android phone to make your interface look like that light phone interface.

4:40Two of the more popular ones are blank spaces and dumb phone, but there are others. All right. So how do you technically, like what are the technical steps to doing something like this, going from all of these icons to just a black and white screen with text on it? What I want to do here is play a little bit of a clip from a longer video about how to do this. This is from a channel called Nicknology. The very popular video that I'm going to play this clip from is viewed something like half a million times. My goal here in playing a clip from this is just to give you a sense of the type of steps involved in these transformations.

5:13Obviously, watch the video for the full set of instructions. All right, let's hear this, Jesse. Actual light phone. Head to the app store and download the dumb phone app. It looks like this. First thing you're going to want to do when you open the app is set up which apps you want on your home screen. I chose phone, messages, notes, Spotify, Google Maps, and Settings. These are the most basic things I use on a very regular basis, and none of them lead to distraction. As you can see, I already have mine set up, but if you hit this little button in the bottom right, you'll be able to select which apps you feel are best for you.

5:43You can also reorder them to your liking. Once you've completed that, you're now ready to add the dumb phone widget to your home screen. You're going to want to start with a completely blank canvas. Long press to activate wiggle mode, then remove all four apps from your dock. Next, swipe over to an empty page, then select edit at the top left. Then add widget. Navigate down until you see dumb phone. You can also search for it by typing DP. Add the first widget to your home screen. All right, so I'll cut it off there, but that should give you an idea of what's going on. Just like quickly summarize.

6:12And I'll say if you're listening, this might be a case where you want to jump over the video so you can see that on the screen. But just to quickly summarize, when you go to that wiggle mode where you can take individual apps off and on different screens, you can take the apps off of the dock on the bottom and now on every screen there'll be no apps on the bottom and then what they did is they navigated to a blank screen you know how you can scroll through different screens and they added a widget from the dumb phone app and then that widget is what you can configure in the dumb phone app to say what apps do i want and what do i want to call them the final thing this is the thing that threw me which i didn't understand when i was watching this video but now i do when i watched a little bit more closely how do you make that your new home screen, just this blank screen with this one widget on it that's displaying the dumb phone app.

6:57There's a mode I didn't recognize, a setting screen where it shows all of the different screens you can side scroll through on your phone and you can uncheck ones you don't want to see. They don't disappear. You can recheck them again and get them back. But if you uncheck them, they're no longer displayed. So you can just uncheck everything except for the screen that has the dumb phone widget. And so now when you turn on your phone, you just see this blank screen with the widget on. There's a lot of other tips in that video. You want to set your background, the match it. There's a spacer widget you can add to keep it centered.

7:28But that's basically what goes into it. You download an app, you set up what apps you want on your simple screen, you say what names you want, and then you do some settings on your phone to make that the only screen you see is one that has that widget centered. All right. So if you do that, you already are, I would say, 70 % of the way or 60 % maybe towards 2007 mode. But now we got to start refining this setup even more, which brings us to our second tip. The next tip comes from a name that's familiar to my listeners, writer Carol, inventor of the bullet journal method of analog life organization.

8:04He has a – what I thought in a video that he posted on his site, a clever idea for how to take the next step. Once you've moved to text-based descriptions of apps, he had an idea for moving to the next step to get even closer to 2007 mode. Let's hear it in his own words, and then we'll talk about it a little bit more. Jesse, let's hear what Ryder had to say. So here's what I did. I changed all app names to verbs, actions that support who I want to be, like write, connect, move, learn, plan. The shift is subtle but powerful. I'm not reacting to brands or my life. I'm exercising my agency one intentional action at a time.

8:47So this is a powerful idea. He's saying as long as you're going to have text-based descriptions of your app, be careful about what text-based descriptions you use. Describe the aspirational outcome you want from using that app. Use that to describe the app instead of its name. So I want to walk through – he mentioned them briefly, but let me walk through specifically the examples he gave in this clip right there. So he began with the following five apps listed text in his sort of minimalist phone setup. He had a writing app called IA Writer, the Messages app, Apple Notes, Instagram, and Calendar.

9:25Those were apps he uses a lot, and he had those descriptions. Here's what he changed each of those descriptions to to make it more value-outcome-oriented. He changed IA Writer to write. So it's just described as write, the action write. He changed messages to the word connect. So, you know, it's not the messages app. It's I click there if I want to connect to other people. And he changed Instagram to learn, calendar to plan, et cetera. So the bigger idea here is the way you see your apps described will change the way that you think of them. And if you really focus in on the value-enhancing action of the app in its description, you now see this device as delivering you value-enhancing actions as opposed to just this sort of mechanistic, consumeristic, transactional relationship with other commercial activities.

10:21I don't know what you would rename TikTok in this scheme though, Jesse. What is the action you're trying to – I think I would just put on my phone, give up. And when I click give up, that means I want to just scroll through TikTok. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

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14:13All right, now let's keep going with our third piece of advice. And this has to do with the app experience themselves. So everything so far is about the interface through which you access apps. But once I click on that app, now I'm back into whatever world that app developer wants me to be in. So I can label Instagram, for example, with whatever aspirational name I want. But when I click on it, I'm in Mark Zuckerberg's world. and all of the things they've optimized that get me mindlessly scrolling through algorithmically curated content or whatever they're doing is still waiting for me in the app.

14:49So my third piece of advice is identify the most addictive apps, the apps that tend to keep you on phone longer than you want to be and make you unhappy. Identify what those are and let's re-engineer the apps themselves so that the experience is more useful, functional, and minimalist. So how do we do this? Well, there's some interesting tools out there that can make a big difference. In particular, there's a whole group of apps now, which you might not have heard of, that work as follows. If you access social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, there's a bunch of different websites that they're compatible with.

15:27If you access them through your browser, there are now apps that can get in there and manipulate what the experience looks like. because we can manipulate. I can't change what the Instagram app looks like, but I can have an app that goes in and changes what the Instagram webpage looks like. It can take things off or add things back to it. Let me play a clip here that explains this a little bit better. This is from the Ray Su's channel, very popular video, had 2.4 million views. I wanna play a little bit of a clip here where he talks about using one of these app experience modification apps. Let's hear this and then we'll check in on it.

16:06And install them there. I recommend the app called Social Focus, which costs$3.99 on iOS and it's free on Android. But with this app, it gives you some basic modifications for every social media site, like YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn, I think, where you can remove the algorithmic feed. You can remove like recommended content and they make it more functional and less addicting. For YouTube specifically, the same developer has another app called Untrap for YouTube, which I've also bought. But it allows you to do stuff like remove the thumbnail or remove recommend videos from the sidebar.

16:40Like this is what my YouTube looks like on my phone. It's just a list where I'm unlikely to fall into a binging rabbit hole. All right. So let's summarize what's happening here. Instead of actually keeping individual apps for social media or YouTube or related sort of potentially addictive apps, instead of keeping those apps on your phone, you will now access them through your browser on your phone. Step two, you will use the type of apps that were mentioned in that Reisu video, and there's a hundred of these, and you can find a lot of videos of these online as well, that will then modify to your exact specifications what you want the experience to be of using those apps.

17:15This is advice that keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. This is the type of advice that when whatever the head of I don't know who his name is, but the head of bite dance, when he turns around his skull of thrones, the check in on how tick tock is doing and how many young kids they've ensnared into addictive cycles. absolutely fears because it strips away the addiction while keeping whatever like small sliver of usefulness you still find in those apps and their whole point is the small sliver of usefulness is supposed to be the lure that gets you to bite the hook which allows them to pull you out of the lake but you get rid of the hook then people are getting value without having to use it all the time they have no reason to use them all the time they become useful the phone becomes like we used to have in 2007.

18:03So I love this idea. There's no social apps on your phone anymore. And if you still, I don't want to have the debate with you now about using social media or not. We've talked about this a lot on the show. I'll put that aside for now, but whatever you are using through the browser modified. So you take back control of that experience. I think that's a very powerful idea. All right, let's move on to our fourth idea. Our fourth tip comes from Mayim Bialik so we are mispronouncing her name Jesse but to you and I that is people our age we obviously know her as Blossom remember Blossom the TV show you were like born in a CrossFit gym and don't know like what's going on in the world it was like a very popular show in like the mid 90s I don't know what you were doing in the 90s I remember the wonder years from like the 80s okay we're the same age man you should remember Blossom Joey her brother Joey you don't remember this I kind of remember that six or seven she had a friend that had a number for a name yeah right I think her name was like six or something okay yeah all right anyways I think slightly younger viewers know her as Amy from the Big Bang Theory she's been around forever anyways she's been doing a bunch of videos about lots of stuff but she did a lot of videos about technology and her struggle to beat her phone addiction and in one of these videos she hinted out an idea that I want.

19:24I'm going to play this clip and I'm going to run with her idea and develop it to be even more severe. So let's start with the clip and then we'll run with what she's suggesting. Number two, I have an incredibly annoying, damaging habit that I have adopted of scrolling through the news anytime there's a lull in anything, any time of day or night, no matter where I am. I have no clue why I started doing this. I'll be just walking like from my car in a parking lot to a doctor's office and I'm like scrolling through news. I end up looking at all these headlines and they're terrible. It's almost always like death and tragedy or forgive me, like celebrity gossip that I do not need to be filling my head with.

20:01This habit is really hard to break. I'm hoping that just by having an awareness of it, it will encourage me to stop doing it. But I might need to take that news app just off my phone. It's. All right. So she gets to the right answer only at the very end. At first, she's like, Like maybe I should like moderate my online news consumption. This is kind of a problem. I wonder if I should really just take the app off my phone, the apps I'm using to get news. That is actually the correct answer. Now, this is an important tip that's often missed because it hits people like me. People like me who don't use social media or maybe if you do, you're using the advice from my last tip and now it's moderated.

20:40It's in a browser. It's in an experience where the addictive elements are stripped off. You don't really have a problem with it, but you still find yourself coming back to your phone all the time because news has borrowed a lot of ideas that the attention engineers innovated, and it can be just as sticky. And now you're like, I'm still on my phone. Instead of doom scrolling TikTok, I'm doom scrolling New York Times headlines. And this could be just as affecting. Jesse, I've had to put up with this a lot recently because I'm doing these new Thursday episodes, the AI reality check episodes, which requires me to read a lot of AI news so that I can sort of help people feel better about it.

21:17And man, there are so many – it goes in waves of topics, but they'll decide, they being like the collective media. Oh, here's some like really negative topic about AI we all need to cover. And then every article is just like pounding this, trying to one-up each other in like the worst way. And so like what might start with AI might affect your job. It kind of like builds up until you get the articles that are talking about how to use your dystopian trash can fire to properly cook your dog so you don't starve. Like it's just dark. It puts me in a bad mood and I know a lot of it's BS. I'm an expert in the topic.

21:52So don't let news become the hidden addicter. And the right way to do it is don't read news using apps on your phone. have an alternative way of consuming news. It can involve your phone, but not an app that can constantly refresh, not something that if you check it when you get out of the car, it's going to be different when you get back to the car. You want more static, high-quality, and self-contained descriptions of the news. So this could be like daily news podcasts. This could be email daily news roundups. That's what I would do. Do not use the news apps because they are just following. I mean we see this by the way like the New York Times figured this out is that they worried about losing readers to X.

22:38So now what they'll do if there's any breaking news event is they'll put article after article after article. They'll put live updates. They found a way to make sure that there's an abundance of information piling up for you to keep reading through so that you can have that same scroll experience you have where it used to be five years ago or 10 years ago. So if something happened, here is an article that explains it. And that's it, right, for that day. That's your news about it. Now it's the pile, pile, pile. Here's it from six different angles and live updates so that you can keep coming back to it.

23:06You have a sense of urgency. So I think news apps is something that is a hidden addiction trap on phones. So follow Blossom's suggestion here and take those apps off of your phone. All right, we're going to get to our fifth tip. I wanted to offer one myself and I wanted to offer one that I hadn't actually explained before instead of like one of my standard pieces of advice. All right. So what is my addition to this collection of advice for putting your phone back into 2007 mode? All right. I have this idea of seeking functional substitutes for, in particular, the social platforms that are engaging you, overly engaging you on your phone.

23:50So we talked about before changing the icons of the social platforms. We talked about before using a browser-based technology in which you can control the experience of what you're seeing on your social apps. Here is my addition to this. Find functional substitutes for those platforms, meaning you ask the following question about the platforms you use. what psychological, emotional, or practical role do these platforms currently play in my life? Like, why is it that I'm going to TikTok? Why is it that I'm going to X? Is it the stave off boredom? Do I go here to try to get hits of inspiration? Is this a numbing thing when I'm stressed out or anxious?

24:35I go here because it's just going to like numb me and I don't have to use my mind. Figure out the specific problems these are solving in your life and then say, what is a positive functional substitute for each of those roles they play? If I use this app to stave off boredom, what's another way to save off boredom that I think is going to be more positive? If this is something I'm using to numb myself and I'm anxious, what's a more positive activity that I can do to save off anxiety? And what I would do is add to your interface on the phone, like descriptions of those goals, stave off boredom, you know, reduce anxiety or what have you.

25:16But now have these links go to these more positive substitutes. So when you pick up that phone, you see the thing you really want to do listed right there, you know, calm anxiety. And now instead of like going to TikTok, it's going to go to something that you find to be more productive. It's going to bring you to a, you know, a podcast page of a sort of soothing podcast, or it's going to take you to a meditation app, or it's going to take you to your workout app to remind you of like, oh, I should go do some exercise. So I think having functional substitutes for social media really helps you decouple from these things that are pulling back to your phone again and again, even when you don't want to be.

25:55All right. So there we go. We had five ways to transform your smartphone into something that's much less distracting and much more useful. So let me go through what we had here. Number one was going to this sort of extreme minimalist interface, which I think is the crux to all of this. Number two was giving better names for the apps on your phone once you're in that interface. Number three was re-engineering the most addictive apps by running them through your browser and using browser modification tools. Number four was don't use phone apps. Use self-contained static forms of news that are updated, say, like once a day or so, so you get rid of that hidden addictive trigger.

26:32And number five, find functional substitutes for social media and then put pointers on your phone that take you to those functional substitutes so your phone is helping you in healthy ways and not in unhealthy ways. So look, there's a lot of other good ideas out there. This is a big discussion online. So if you go look at any of those videos that we pulled clips from today and you watched them in your entirety, you'll see a lot of other suggestions. You'll see a lot of people are talking about this out here. You can customize this as you see fit. But the key thing here is you can take back control of your phone.

27:04You can transform it back to something that supports your life. You can regain a little bit of that excitement that we felt back in 2007. And I think now is the time to do it. Is your phone set up like that? I'm going to do the minimalist interface. You are? Yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't use social media. I don't, I don't have as much of a problem, but I like the idea of the minimalist interface. And I, and I think I'm going to use to writer carol descriptions as well um i don't need to re-engineer the addictive apps because i really don't use that many of those but i think that's you know a good one um i guess i don't use news apps i do use the new york times app so i'll have to think about that and for the last one i i might do that right so i don't use social media necessarily but i think it'd be nice to have things i you know relieve boredom anxiety like have some links on my phone that take me to a healthy way to do that so then my phone like it'll just change my relationship to the phone it'd be a source of solutions you know for problems if you're going to a ball game and you need like the ticket stub master app how would you do that you just go to the other page yeah you go to the other page and it shows up all your yeah so you can have i was watching these videos so like what people there's a couple things you can do there's two options some people just have their their home screen now is minimalist it's black and white with just the things listed And it's like the main things they use.