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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