10-minute smartphone challenge: Easier than imagined

The context

A few weeks ago, I started a personal challenge to limit my smartphone use to less than 10 minutes per day. If you missed my previous article, here's the two sentence summary:

I noticed my smartphone was sucking too much of my attention and made me a shitty example for my four-year-old. I don't want him to see me addicted to my phone and don't want him to one day say: "You're using your phone all the time, so I can too!".

What Went Well?

Surprisingly, getting into to this challenge wasn't as hard as I thought. Here a few elements that went well:

• 10 minute limit: One element that helped I think was to reframe it not as a "no smartphone challenge" but rather as a "less than 10 minutes of smartphone per day". This allows me to still handle essential tasks like taking photos, checking authentication codes, and navigating public transport.

• Better wind down: Before this challenge, I had fallen into the bad habit of using my phone in bed to wind down after long days. Sadly this became a true habit that was even necessary for me to fall asleep. The challenge helped me come back to better bedtime routines I had a few months before.

• Looking for the weekly average: I'm not super strict about making it perfect every day but try to have the weekly average to be of 10 minutes or less per week is enough. As I'm in this challenge for one year, this makes it also easier.

The Power of Friction

This experiment has shown again how powerful a good friction is. It helps so much in reducing unnecessary actions. For example, I'm now listening to podcasts on my smartwatch instead of my phone. It’s slower and less easy so from time to time I just decide to not do it at all, because it's too much work to get that distraction.

Another example is checking notes. Previously, I'd quickly check addresses on my phone. Now, with the added friction of using my laptop or writing things down by hand, I've found analog solutions that work just as well without the digital distraction.

What's Next: back to DSLR

One new thing I'm trying is using my DSLR camera to take photos instead of using on my phone. My DSLR takes beautiful pictures, and if this switch works out, I won't need an expensive iPhone anymore.

Until now, I've needed a good smartphone for taking pictures of my kid and our family, and to take pictures of workshop results.. But if I get back into the habit of using my DSLR, I won't need anymore an expensive phone with a great camera.

Will I Continue This Challenge?

Oh yes! I've committed to do this challenge for one year and will continue! I'm also using this blog as a space to share how the journey is going. Writing about it makes me more accountable to this promise I made to myself. It will also be pretty interesting to look back on these notes in one year and see how things have evolved.

Made with AI help
I recorded this blog post in audio form, then used AudioPen to transcribe and fix the text, and finally reviewed and improved it.