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Not that long ago I realized that smartphones are detrimental to my quality of life. It is a scary revelation for a geek like me.

I had been dreaming about PDAs since the day I saw one of early Windows CE models in a magazine. Eventually, I got myself a nice Windows Mobile phone. It was exceptionally capable. With Opera mobile browser, I could look up things online in life-or-death situations (before you ask, WM version didn't use proxy servers). I could give a quick reply to friends in Jabber. I could make short notes in Word, check emails, and keep my calendar in order (and never forget friends' birthdays!).

What a delightful device. The best part about it? I always wanted to put it back into my pocket or purse after I finished using it.

Side-note: this phone could also run Android, and so I dual-booted mine to play Angry Birds. There weren't that many things that made Android more attractive than Windows back then.

(to be continued)

When I think about it, I don't even think the dissatisfaction phones cause me is linked to Android or iOS directly. After all, I've been a happy owner of an Android phone for quite a while.

I was poor, but all the people around started to upgrade to Android, so eventually I replaced my resistive-touch Windows phone with THE cheapest capacity-touch Android phone. Both phones had a 2.8" screen, which seemed more than reasonable to me back then.

Seriously, who needs a bigger screen for a side-kick device used only occasionally to check mail, keep your calendar in sync, or send a short text a-la "omw eta 15 mins"?

As you all know, this happiness didn't last long. I don't know what was it: maybe smartphones became as cheap as feature phones, maybe capacity touch was such revolutionary thing, maybe finger-aimed interfaces were a massive upgrade to "try to hit the right button with your stylus while riding a train". Suddenly everyone got a smartphone.

(to be continued)

In the late 2012, Facebook announced it's going to be Mobile First. Others followed, an in a blink of an eye, all the social media got phone apps, all the sites became at least "mobile-optimized", and all the people around me suddenly stopped using their computers for chats, and started to spend much more time using their phones.

Incidentally, to make this "socializing from your phone" comfortable, you need a more powerful CPU and a bigger screen. After only ~1.5 years of usage, my Alcatel smartphone became obsolete, and I was practically forced to upgrade to a massive 5" screen of Xiaomi Mi4.

At first, I was overjoyed. My replies didn't have to be curt anymore, I could type in long-ish sentences, and I could even imagine myself doing a little bit of work from such a device (if only it had a physical keyboard!)

But soon I had to do what pretty much everyone I know does: switch the phone to silent mode to keep my sanity. Because All The Apps started to use and abuse phone notifications.

(to be continued)

The endless notifications were just the first symptom of a phonesickness, and perhaps the most harmless one. With a few switches, I could use my smartphone just the way I used my feature phone: open a chat app to check the messages when I want, not when the phone tells me to.

I should have noticed other symptoms years ago, when I first heard about micro-learning apps. "Anytime, anywhere, learn a new skill in under a few minutes". Education doesn't require you to find at least a 30 minutes long time slot! You can do it between other things, you can multitask!

In fact, you can multitask between anything. Education, work, entertainment. Do it when you have a free minute, put it away when you're busy, and continue right from where you stopped next time.

Do you want to finally learn Japanese? No problem, just open Duo every time you have a break. Try to ignore other tasty-looking icons with unread notification counter (especially reddit and 9gag and such). You can always check them out a bit later, right?

Congratulations, you are addicted to your phone now.

You take it out of your pocket every moment you are distracted from whatever you were doing. You seek the dopamine hit you get from a new level in your microlearning app or from a funny joke your (online-only, maybe met twice for a coffee) friend sends to you. You don't always get it, but you know it IS there, so you keep checking your phone regularly just like a lab rat keeps pressing "feed me" button.

A while ago, Android added "screen time" monitor. I was shocked to see that I regularly spend over 4 hours a day using my phone, unlocking it over 100 times a day (during small interruptions and breaks), with little to no meaningful gain from these unlocks. I set up a timer for Firefox usage, aiming to doomscroll for no more than 30 minutes a day), and still I can see I use my phone for ~2.5 hours a day, and I still get over 200 (muted) notifications daily.

This is insane. This is unsustainable, yet this is how I/we live now.

Digital Wellbeing is a nice app, definitely helpful when you need to set up boundaries for yourself, and it's probably a good thing for building healthier habits, but it isn't enough. Using app-limiting timers is akin to limiting yourself to 2000 kcal a day or, say, to 2 cigarettes a day; it won't make you crave the things you see right before your eyes any less.

And it sucks. You KNOW that if you had 10 minutes of Firefox more, you'd find something hilarious for sure. If you had WhatsApp chat unlocked for more than 30 minutes a day, you'd certainly have a chance to chat to your crush. It is tempting. And it doesn't even work, you can extend the time limit at will, or you can install a new app that will demand your attention as much as the ones you've time limited.

You also know it is a time sink and bad for your mood. What do you do then? What CAN you do?

"If you cannot find a more attractive habit, make your unhealthy habit less attractive." It is surprising how effective such an approach can be!

Have you seen what babies do when presented with dull-colored organic-dyed wooden toys AND acid-bright plastic toys? They grab the bright ones. What can you do to help the babies to play with healthier toys? Right, you take away toxic-smelling bright plastic toys from them.

Following this logic, I switched my phone to monochrome. Android allows to do that in Developer options. The screen is still bright and high-contrast, and most apps still can be used as expected. But it just doesn't feel as good or interesting. Such a small change, but with it I don't want to swap to another app or scroll the feed anymore.

I feel less distracted by my phone now. The phone usage statistics for this experiment are yet to come, though.

...Oh wow, this thread is getting longer than I expected. TBC!

Okay, I have covered the phone usage and distractions, but you know, I think I am much more distracted when I use my computer, compared to a decade ago. Why is that?

I think it's the Internet. When I do focused work, every now and then I want to google a thing or two. I open a new tab, and...

I know, I know, I have no one to blame but myself for getting distracted by social media icons and featured articles that I actually might even enjoy.

Wait, scratch that!

Hey browser makers, can I have a word? You are hurting me, little by little, by distracting me from things that actually matter, so you could, uhm, let me check, make more money? Well, screw you too!

I wonder how many human-years Chrome, Firefox and Edge combined have destroyed in 2023 alone by using "recommended" new tab instead of about:blank or good old minimalist search bar.

I have tried all sorts of things to fight distractions while working on my laptop. There are many small things that help.

For example, I try to use the smallest computer screen possible. If I cannot see more than one window at a time, I am less likely to switch to a chat app and waste an hour there thinking "who else should I message?" while scrolling through memes in a massive group chat.

I also limit the Internet speed using my router, to 5 Mbps on my laptop and 1 Mbps on my phone. This sounds like a lot (it's an average 3G connection speed), but many sites and apps really start to struggle with this speed, making me annoyed with them and forcing to switch back to more productive things.

But there are very few things that work better than locking myself out of the multitasking. For example, ColdTurkey Writer turns my laptop in typewriter, and I cannot exit it unless I hit my writing goals or reboot my computer.

But guess what, if you write best when using an app that turns your laptop in a typewriter, maybe, just maybe, you should use a typewriter?

I got myself one a couple of years ago, and I am impressed with it. I use it for most of my creative writing nowadays. Why?

* No distractions from notifications, pop-ups or multiple open windows.
* Impressive tactile feedback.
* No backspace/delete function, so zero chance of getting stuck in a loop of typing a paragraph, and then deleting it because you immediately thought it's lame.
* Doesn't require electricity or internet connection.

The typewriter doesn't solve all my problems, of course.

One big issue is the need to OCR the text for editing and publishing. It's a mild annoyance if you have only a few pages, but it becomes a chore if your "document" is long.

Another issue is typewriter doesn't help to fight distractions for technical writing and coding, when I need to look up things online or "online".

But there IS a solution that doesn't have those issues!

Maybe "normal people" don't have attention and focus issues. Maybe this is why all the modern interfaces are made to look like a shopping district of a cyberpunk film, beckoning for customers. But I do have focus issues, and I know many of my friends struggle all the same. And we KNOW that computers used to fun, we REMEMBER how satisfying they were to use, before all the programs became websites or online-only Electron apps.

One day, just by chance, I got my hands on a 486 laptop, and it was SO MUCH FUN. I know I am biased here, because I've spent a decade of my life using 486 and P1 machines. Windows 95 is a bit slow on 486/40 with 8MB, but it is as fun to use as it was two decades ago. No pesky notifications, you wouldn't dream of multitasking between multiple browser windows, but you CAN look up things online, even if your web is limited to non-SSL no-JS sites.

I have successfully replicated this experience multiple times, with multiple machines.

The recipe for distraction-free computing fun for me is simple. The computer must be old enough so it won't run modern web, but it must have some sort of a web browser so I could look up things online when I need it, without using another computer and eventually getting myself distracted there.

You can try "really old" computers for that. Both Mac Classic II and Compaq286 worked for me. They don't handle web well, but magical.fish gives me most of what I want from the Internet. Everything else works as expected - CD, MIDI, text editors, age-appropriate compilers, etc.

You can try newer computers, too. The newest computer I have tried for this purpose was Pentium 3-1000. It runs modern Linux swimmingly, I can code whatever I want on it, it has DAW and guitar tabs software I like, it has no issues with playing my music in background. It can even run latest Firefox or Chromium BUT it is a torture for most web sites. Success! Links2 in graphics mode or Netsurf work great, and handle modern SSL perfectly.

If you ask me for my honest impression, I'd say that 286 is a biiiit of a pain to use, but mostly because modern web pages are so big they don't fit into 640K of RAM anymore. I think 486/P-1/P-2 is my sweet spot for distraction-free computing, powerful enough to handle most tasks I want with ease, but totally useless for modern web and apps.

​ So, maybe we need an operating system that will do just THAT? Something made with humans and their actual needs in mind, not something made to reap those sweet advertisement profits...

Until such a system created, well, I'm going to spend lots of time using old computers. Sorry, they just feel so much more satisfying than whatever we have today.

Thread end. Thanks for hanging around while I was typing all this!

@nina_kali_nina This is one of the reasons I like having a separate email client *and* that all my RSS feeds are in there - closing that gets rid of *lots* of my distractions. Of course, I don't close it as much as I should...

I'm also super curious as to whether you use the web browser on your Psion Series 5; given that I wrote some of it

@amcewen sadly, I don't use Psion 5 due to its screen being too low contrast. I wonder if it's an issue with the screen or backlight, and whether it can be fixed... Thank you for the browser though! :)

@nina_kali_nina ah, shame. I guess it might be a low backlight - I don't remember how good they were now (or if there was one even?!), but Psion were super keen on getting weeks of use out of two AA batteries, so the backlight likely wasn't too bright as a result.

@amcewen somehow, with the backlight on, all I can see is the backlight. So maybe it's the LCD itself. It looks great on the photos though :D