How Having Two Phones Helps Me Use My Phone Less

    About a year ago, the phone I’d been using stopped charging reliably. Since I have a cheap phone, I was disappointed but not too surprised and promptly bought another cheap phone. However, even though I'd tried for several days to revive my old phone, it wasn’t until I’d already bought the new phone that I got the old phone to start charging again. That’s how I found myself with two phones. Of course, only one of them actually had a SIM card and the ability to call/text, so the other one was basically a tiny tablet. And that got me thinking. I’d wanted to get rid of nonessentials on my phone for a while, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete potentially hundreds of hours of game progress. And now I was in a situation where my games were already on a different phone than my essential phone functions. Why not make it official? I could use one phone as a stripped back smartphone and one as a tablet. I wasn't expecting great results, but the system worked so well that I’ve been using it ever since. There’s been a lot of fluctuation over time in what apps I decide to keep on each phone, but the overall system stays the same. Here’s my theories about why it works.

1.    Minimizes distractions

    When I pick up my actual phone to check notifications or text a friend, I can’t get distracted by social media or game notifications because they simply aren’t there.

2.    Makes me less likely to circumvent the rules

    When I had only one phone and was trying to not allow social media or games on it at all, it was really difficult to stick to the plan. Now that I do have somewhere to play mobile games, I don’t feel such a need to get around my own restrictions.

3.    Adds friction to phone leisure time

    I can’t just pick up my phone and mindlessly scroll or game for hours, because I have to make the intentional choice to put down my phone, walk to whatever place in my house my ‘tablet’ happens to be, and switch to it. This means less overall gaming and social mediaing. 

So, what do I actually keep on my real phone? 

Well, probably more apps than you’d think. I’m not a perfect person and if I only wanted to call/text I’d just get a dumbphone. But here’s what I have going on.

• Of course, I still have standard utility apps such as weather, calculator, colornote, and uber. I won't go into detail about those because that would be boring. 
• Communication apps: Unfortunately, it just wouldn't be possible to get everyone in my life to switch to Signal, so I do have to decide which other apps I actually want on my phone. 
• Some of my friends almost exclusively use Snapchat. It does have a browser version, but I know if I got rid of the app, I would forget to check for messages. So my compromise is to keep the app and block the discover feed.
• GroupMe doesn't come with distractions, and every time I try to remove it I end up back in another GroupMe group. So it stays.
• I have one friend who likes to send me videos through Marco Polo.
• I have really wrestled with Discord. Some of my friends use it to communicate, but I'm also in 40+ servers (more on that in a future post) and I often use it to just scroll instead. I started with putting it on my gaming phone, but then I was just carrying both phones around with me all the time. Then I moved it to my actual phone, but I was using it as a distraction. Finally, I removed it from both phones. I do sometimes miss things from friends, but I feel less anxious and I pick up my phone way less. Experiment, and find a solution that works for you.
• I don't have any friends that contact me through Facebook Messenger, just group chats and people I am selling things to. So I keep it on my gaming phone as a compromise.  
•  Email: some people will want to remove email from their phone entirely, but I turned off notifications for emails about 2 years ago. This was an effective compromise to prevent me from using Gmail unless I really did need to check something.
• Media apps: I have to be careful with these, because I want to be able to consume media without it taking over my life.
• If I could only keep one media app, it would definitely be Libby. It allows me to easily check out books and audiobooks with my library card and read them on my phone. It's a great way to redirect doomscrolling instincts.
•  I know Spotify is bad in a lot of ways, but I haven't yet had the energy to explore alternatives, and music is extremely important to me.
• I keep a local talk radio app for when I want to listen to something but don't want to deal with Youtube or Spotify.
• I don't use Webtoon much anymore, but it's around from when I was younger.
• I made a very strong choice to keep Youtube off my real phone. Youtube is one of my worst apps for getting sucked into and I can easily spend hours a day on it.  Having it only accessible through my computer or gaming phone has helped a lot.
• Hobbies 
• Having the Goodreads app easily accessible helps me actually remember to track my reading. 
• I keep a simple Sketchbook in case I want to make a quick drawing or more visual note. 
• Even though I've never made it to a geohash, the geohash droid app still helps encourage me to learn more about my area. 
• Home Workout is more of an aspirational app for me, but I keep hoping one day I will get really bored and use it.
• I have chronic pain, and Walk The Distance helps encourage me to walk more by turning my steps into a position on one of the famous American trails.. 
• Browsers
• I have really struggled trying to decide what to do with my phone browser. It seems obvious that a phone should have a browser, but it's really easy for me to get into unhealthy googling spirals, or just generally use the browser to distract myself or waste time, so I quickly realized that keeping Firefox wouldn't work. For a few months, I was using a weird stripped down version of Firefox called Firefox Focus that only allows one tab and deletes whatever you're looking at when you close it. It did help, but I didn't think it helped enough. Eventually, I found a text only browser app called Violoncello. I think it's SUPER COOL but I don't use it as often as I'd like. This is because I found a workaround where I could use the Google app as a browser, which is not ideal for a lot of reasons, but I'll keep trying to fix things.
• Time Management Apps 
• Because I struggle with severe executive dysfunction, I usually have some kind of routine app on my phone. Brilli is expensive but works really well, and PlanMe seems to be good also. 
• StayFree and YourHour are both good apps to help monitor and set limits on screen time, and they each have different advantages/disadvantages. That might also be a future blog post.
• Todoist is my favorite to-do app and I have used it on and off for at least 7 years.  
• Games
• That's right, I do sometimes keep some games on my phone. I did say I was imperfect. But, I have relatively strict rules about them. They have to be games I don't go out of my way to play and only get out if I am stuck in a waiting situation. If I get too attached to a game, I send it to my other phone. Generally, that means I only keep 1-3 really simple games and I make sure all notifications are off.  

    I don't think anyone should go out and buy a new phone just for the purpose of splitting up digital life. If you're going to buy anything, probably a tablet would be a better option anyway. But, if you already happen to have an old device laying around, this strategy is definitely worth a try.

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Switching To Facebook Let Me Get What I Wanted Out Of Social Media

    I understand that the title of this post is surprising. Facebook has a very negative legacy, and that legacy is well deserved. However, I was surprised to find that, if I use Facebook in a controlled way, it’s the best social media site for my internet usage goals. I’ve spent many years having problems with social media use, especially Reddit, but even Instagram and Twitter at times. Because the content is endless and designed to provoke emotion, I spend much longer than I want to and feel worse when I leave. So I started thinking about what I actually want out of social media. I realized that when I use social media productively, it’s usually to either find events to attend offline, or to connect with my local community in some way. While being connected with global communities of users (at least, users who speak the same language as you) can be great, especially for niche hobbies, doing things in person is extremely important to me and having such a spread out network makes that basically impossible.This is where Facebook comes into the picture. 

    It might just be the sheer number of users that allows for local connections, but even small towns have multiple discussion groups, and my local government even uses it as one of their main forms of communication. On Facebook, I am in a group that is designed for talking about my city, a group for trading items between each other in my city, and a group for lgbt discussion for the large city near me. Not only that, but I can easily browse events happening in person in my city and cities near me, many of which are only posted on Facebook. Of course, it would be possible to use Facebook in a different way that doesn’t align with my goals, but as long as I’m careful it’s been very helpful to me. I’ve been able to attend events that I never would have known about otherwise, and I’ve also gained access to smaller chat groups where people discuss and do things locally. Even if I do just post or comment on Facebook, I am at least involved in issues in my community or trying to help people in my community, which I think is important to help me feel connected.

Precautions

    I definitely do not want to imply that Facebook doesn’t have problems or that everyone should be using it. Facebook is the social network with the most money and power to put towards being addictive, and it absolutely has used its platform to do terrible things in the pursuit of profit in the past. I am lucky in that I find Facebook too complicated to fully appeal to me, but I still make sure to take precautions.First, I always use a browser that prevents tracking (Firefox) to access Facebook, and I don’t download Facebook or Instagram on my phone. Facebook makes most of its money through closely tracking its users' internet activity and serving targeted advertising, and I prefer to opt out of invasive tracking wherever possible.

    Within Facebook itself, I only follow people I know in real life or join communities that are local, to prevent myself from being sucked into general internet activities. The one exception to this is a group for a rare disease I have that I can’t find much information on otherwise.

    I also have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which helps me get rid of the parts of Facebook I don’t have an interest in. I block all suggested and sponsored posts, and I also use keywords to block political posts from showing up. I particularly like Social Fixer because it shows me the title of what it’s hidden and I can click to see it if I think it’s actually important. Another great feature of Social Fixer is that it stops the feed from being endless. The feed is broken into pages, each of which have a certain number of posts, and you then have to click see more at the bottom if you want to load more posts. This helps provide natural stopping points for browsing.

    Finally, I use StayFree to set a 10 minute per day time limit and OneSec to make me stop and think before accessing facebook. With all of these customizations, I feel like I am able to use facebook in a way that prevents me from being addicted – I actually often feel annoyed when I need to access facebook for something.

    I definitely don’t think it’s for everyone, but if you are in your 20s and have never really used Facebook, it might be worth a look to see if it would be useful for you, especially if you are moving away from other social medias.