Converting my Smartphone into a Dumphone

[2Square]

Hello everyone,
I found the Reject Convenience channel yesterday and have fallen into the rabbit hole. I just watched “I Switched to a Dumb Phone – 2-year check-in” video and decided to check out the forum as well. I am in the middle of my own journey finding a healthy relationship with my phone and wanted to share the steps I took to turn my smartphone into a dumb phone. All of this is on a Samsung S22

1) Grayscale
Setting your phone to grayscale is probably the most suggested solution to screen time. For good reason too, it helps. There is still a lot of self-control needed to stop from turning it off when scrolling through feeds or in general use. Not being able to see the vibrant colors attracting the user to the app is a good first step to reducing the call of the phone. Tip: make it hard to turn off screen time. Samsung let’s you add it to your navigation bar and that is what I had for awhile but I found I turned grayscale off before scrolling social media which defeats the purpose of having it on.

2) Time Limits
Setting time limits on addicting or time-wasting apps is a good way to make sure you are limiting you phone usage. I have an overall screen usage goal of at max 1 hour a day and keep track of how I do each day in a notebook. I don’t always meet this goal and have weeks where I seem to forget I am limiting my usage at all, but it does help having a goal. I use the built in app timer features for my phone but that is because 1) I don’t want a 3rd party app reading my screen 24/7 and 2) the apps I did try did not track my app usage time consistently.

3) Get rid of all those apps!
Getting rid of apps is the hardest step. I went from around 120 apps to 67 (over half of which are forced installed thanks to Samsung). If I need to use an app, I download it and use it only for what was called for in that instance, and the second I am done with that task, I uninstall it. This keeps the distractions my phone can offer limited. I uninstalled all my social media apps and access those accounts through my browser if I want to. Rejecting convenience is one of the best ways to keep from mindless usage.

4) Get rid of those app icons!
This is the biggest and most effective way I have limited my phone addiction. I do not have a single app icon on my home screen. I downloaded a launcher called AIO Launcher (I recommended the launcher but have not investigated any data collection practices, take my recommendation as a user experience only) and turned my home screen into nothing but the 4 non-social media apps I use most often all in text form. My app library is a list of text rather than folders of icons. Now if I want to use something other than my main apps, I have to search for it specifically instead of its icon catching my attention.

I attached two screenshots of my homepage to show what I mean

These are the most impactful steps I have taken to reducing my phone addiction, other steps such as decentralizing the actions I take on my phone, i.e. getting rid of Spotify and using Tidal and Pocket Casts separately instead of both my music and podcasts on the same app, and blocking all but important notifications have helped a lot as well. Let me know if anyone has started a similar journey and how similar or different the steps you took are compared to mine.

2Square

[rejectconvenience]

I love how thoughtful this is all presented!! It's super helpful to see how other folks handle things to help inspire yourself! Thank you so much for sharing. I think switching what you already have is a fantastic way to handle things! ALSO @2Square welcome to the forum, it's pretty cool here, enjoy the frog pics!