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A comparison to cigarettes is not fair because I can quit cigarettes without any ramifications beyond the withdrawal itself. Trying to quit overuse of mobile p

A comparison to cigarettes is not fair because I can quit cigarettes without any ramifications beyond the withdrawal itself. Trying to quit overuse of mobile phones while not losing access to their good features (maps, calendar, actual phone) is like trying to quit smoking while constantly walking around with a lit cigarette in your mouth. "Hey man what are you doing with a cig behind your desk?" - "I'm trying to quit smoking."

excalibur 7y ago
Use some sort of parental controls app, lock the phone down so it can do exactly the things you want it to and nothing else. If necessary you can have a spouse or other trusted person set a password on it that you don't know, so you can't just turn the restrictions off.
- slantyyz 7y ago
  I consider a big part of the problem to be notifications, and their respective default settings. Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them. Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent. I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media. When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.
  - jgroszko 7y ago
    A lot of my smart phone usage lately seems to be around managing how much attention my phone can grab from me. I let very few apps send me notifications on my phone. I check it enough without it making noises at me. And if an app doesn't let me disable notifications then I just uninstall it. Facebook Messenger was awful about this, when I saw there was no "Disable notifications", only a "Turn notifications off for 24 hours" option I immediately uninstalled it. Facebook was even worse, ostensibly you could turn notification types off individually, but whenever they added a new type of notification you'd have to go in and turn that off too, or it'd just forget what other notifications you had turned off and you'd start getting them again. Amusingly uninstalling the Facebook app gave me a nice battery performance boost too. Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. Why should any random person on the internet be able to grab my attention like that?
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      One regrettable casualty of this is that I've noticed that almost everyone I know is super unresponsive to texts now. I'm not expecting a fully-interrupt-driven ability to grab someone's attention at any time, but ive even seen cases when you're actively in conversation with someone about something concrete (eg details of a plan) and they drop off in the middle of it. I still think this is pretty rude, but its understandable given that they haven't bothered to make their notifications higher granularity (for my part, I've disabled notifications at the Android level for most of the abusive apps, like Facebook) > Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. I figure the next step in the evolution of norms will be this understanding of granularity filtering down to the non-tech-savvy masses.
      - slantyyz 7y ago
        Call me old school, but for conversations relating to something concrete and time sensitive, I prefer to do a voice call. I don't trust any text based medium for that. I use a hierarchy when it comes to prioritizing communications and notifications: Voice > sms > work im/email > personal im/email Based on that hierarchy, I have different sets of rules as to the types of notifications I get and when I get them.
hos234 7y ago
It has to be done as a group. Both at family/work/friends circle. It started with my team at work getting together one day (almost a year and half back - some Trump BS was unfolding) and saying, if it gets too bad lets decide as a group to block ports/sites/apps etc on the company network. Slowly the list of things to block started growing. It was really surprising how easily one could get consensus, that something specific was too distracting, effecting people and group productivity. Nobody wants to be the guy who says HN is addictive. But once someone says it at a meeting everyone starts nodding. News sites were the first to go. Then video. Then social media and most instant messaging/irc. We have moved to Signal to avoid some of the dark patterns in other IM/chat apps. And everyone is using the google/apple well being apps. Almost everything is done on email or face to face these days. And almost 70 people now in what we call the noise cancellation club. Right now things get unblocked during lunch time for 30 mins and after 5pm. There are common areas where things are unblocked, but they are intentionally pretty public spaces. People of course can use their phones, but the fact that there is this environment available where it has become socially acceptable to be phone free, has definitely made a difference.
wutbrodo 7y ago
A good comparison is to junk food addiction, which I've heard described as "an alcoholic trying to quit but being required to have just a couple drinks a day"
wtetzner 7y ago
Can't you just not sign in to social media sites on your mobile phone? If you don't want to delete social media accounts, maybe change your passwords to something you can't easily remember, and only login on a particular computer at home or something. Honestly, I didn't even need to go that far. Just turning off notifications for Facebook was enough for me to completely stop using it.

excalibur 7y ago

Use some sort of parental controls app, lock the phone down so it can do exactly the things you want it to and nothing else. If necessary you can have a spouse or other trusted person set a password on it that you don't know, so you can't just turn the restrictions off.

slantyyz 7y ago
I consider a big part of the problem to be notifications, and their respective default settings. Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them. Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent. I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media. When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.
- jgroszko 7y ago
  A lot of my smart phone usage lately seems to be around managing how much attention my phone can grab from me. I let very few apps send me notifications on my phone. I check it enough without it making noises at me. And if an app doesn't let me disable notifications then I just uninstall it. Facebook Messenger was awful about this, when I saw there was no "Disable notifications", only a "Turn notifications off for 24 hours" option I immediately uninstalled it. Facebook was even worse, ostensibly you could turn notification types off individually, but whenever they added a new type of notification you'd have to go in and turn that off too, or it'd just forget what other notifications you had turned off and you'd start getting them again. Amusingly uninstalling the Facebook app gave me a nice battery performance boost too. Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. Why should any random person on the internet be able to grab my attention like that?
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    One regrettable casualty of this is that I've noticed that almost everyone I know is super unresponsive to texts now. I'm not expecting a fully-interrupt-driven ability to grab someone's attention at any time, but ive even seen cases when you're actively in conversation with someone about something concrete (eg details of a plan) and they drop off in the middle of it. I still think this is pretty rude, but its understandable given that they haven't bothered to make their notifications higher granularity (for my part, I've disabled notifications at the Android level for most of the abusive apps, like Facebook) > Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. I figure the next step in the evolution of norms will be this understanding of granularity filtering down to the non-tech-savvy masses.
    - slantyyz 7y ago
      Call me old school, but for conversations relating to something concrete and time sensitive, I prefer to do a voice call. I don't trust any text based medium for that. I use a hierarchy when it comes to prioritizing communications and notifications: Voice > sms > work im/email > personal im/email Based on that hierarchy, I have different sets of rules as to the types of notifications I get and when I get them.

hos234 7y ago

It has to be done as a group. Both at family/work/friends circle. It started with my team at work getting together one day (almost a year and half back - some Trump BS was unfolding) and saying, if it gets too bad lets decide as a group to block ports/sites/apps etc on the company network. Slowly the list of things to block started growing. It was really surprising how easily one could get consensus, that something specific was too distracting, effecting people and group productivity. Nobody wants to be the guy who says HN is addictive. But once someone says it at a meeting everyone starts nodding. News sites were the first to go. Then video. Then social media and most instant messaging/irc. We have moved to Signal to avoid some of the dark patterns in other IM/chat apps. And everyone is using the google/apple well being apps. Almost everything is done on email or face to face these days. And almost 70 people now in what we call the noise cancellation club. Right now things get unblocked during lunch time for 30 mins and after 5pm. There are common areas where things are unblocked, but they are intentionally pretty public spaces. People of course can use their phones, but the fact that there is this environment available where it has become socially acceptable to be phone free, has definitely made a difference.

wutbrodo 7y ago

A good comparison is to junk food addiction, which I've heard described as "an alcoholic trying to quit but being required to have just a couple drinks a day"

wtetzner 7y ago

Can't you just not sign in to social media sites on your mobile phone? If you don't want to delete social media accounts, maybe change your passwords to something you can't easily remember, and only login on a particular computer at home or something. Honestly, I didn't even need to go that far. Just turning off notifications for Facebook was enough for me to completely stop using it.