105 hours: No time for smartphones

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Today, we spend too many of those hours on our smartphones.

So I decided not to have one.

Faustian smartphone bargain

People I know have a love-and-hate relationship with their smartphones. I call it the Faustian smartphone bargain.

When I tell people I decided not to have a phone anymore, they exclaim, "Wow! Good for you!", "I'm so happy for you!" which are, honestly, more exalted than the responses I got when I stopped drinking alcohol.

They then immediately segway to why they could never do it: "I have to use Whatsapp for work," "I have a house up for sale and have to take calls.", "I need to know what's happening at my [kid's school/home/community]." They all sound like good reasons to me, wanting to stay connected to things they care about.

But if those are good things, why praise someone for not doing them?

Implicit in the praise is that I'm not spending time on the other smartphone activities that are viewed negatively: social media, news, videos, Whatsapp groups, and other forms of "being glued to the phone" and "wasting time scrolling."

This love-and hate-relationship with our phones is what I call the Faustian smartphone bargain: the idea that we get a critical and irreplaceable value from our smartphones and that we must pay for it with something of critical and irreplaceable value in return.

But the Faustian smartphone bargain is false. There's a bargain, alright, trade-offs, but it doesn't have to be the Devil offering unlimited power in exchange for one's soul.

But if it's false, why are we so caught up in it?

Connection control

"We're flooded with information" – I lost count of how many times I've heard this.

But I disagree. We're not being flooded with anything. Nobody is "bombarding us" with information. We're doing it to ourselves.

Like a Faust that complains about having too many choices or too much to do after becoming omnipotent, we cuff ourselves to the firehose, throw the key away, and then complain of being wet.

The problem is not the firehose – it's doing exactly what it's designed to do.

The problem is the handcuffs.

The most significant value of the smartphone is in its connection. Disconnect it from the internet and the carrier, and this isolated computing device is no longer as valuable or exciting.

The problem is not in the connection itself – we want to stay connected to those we care about. The problem is we lack control mechanisms for our connection.

It's our connection that is out of control.

Connection friction

I don't use the internet. The first step to not using the internet is not having a phone. It's my way of taking strict control of my connection.

Likewise, the first step to reducing our internet use is to reduce our phone use.

Trying to reduce internet use while carrying a phone is like trying to reduce our drinking while carrying a scotch pocket bottle – it won't work.

Phones give us the frictionless experience necessary for using those apps created to be behaviorally addictive; those apps we complain are negative and are flooding us with information.

If I used the internet, I could do on a personal computer almost everything I could do on the phone, except with more difficulty and more friction. I could check social media, but not in less than a second, no matter where in the world I was. I could get notified when something happens, but not immediately no matter where in the world it happened.

Friction.

While for me, the right amount of internet use on the phone is zero, I understand not everyone can or wants to be this strict.

But everyone can evaluate if they have the right amount of friction on their internet use.

Friction as usage control

No matter which activity, be it talking to friends, browsing the news, or checking social media, the friction of the medium makes a big difference in how much time we spend on it.

In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about how reducing friction helps us build habits.

That's what smartphones are doing to us: building in us the habit of using their apps:

One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design. In Chapter 6, we discussed environment design as a method for making cues more obvious, but you can also optimize your environment to make actions easier. [..] Perhaps even more effective is reducing the friction within your home or office. [..] It doesn’t have to be this way. We can remove the points of friction that hold us back. [..] If you look at the most habit-forming products, you’ll notice that one of the things these goods and services do best is remove little bits of friction from your life.

James Clear then comments on increasing friction for behaviors we want to do less of.

You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult. If you find yourself watching too much television, for example, then unplug it after each use. Only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch. This setup creates just enough friction to prevent mindless viewing.
If that doesn’t do it, you can take it a step further. Unplug the television and take the batteries out of the remote after each use, so it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it back on. And if you’re really hard-core, move the television out of the living room and into a closet after each use. You can be sure you’ll only take it out when you really want to watch something. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.

Clear, James. Atomic Habits (p. 157). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It's counterintuitive because we're calibrated for scarcity and for more of something good being a good thing: more information, more connection, more ease, more movies, more music, more food.

Instead, we should reflect on our values and work to find the right amount necessary to nurture them.

Even if that amount is zero.