I Hate My Phone

Friday, March 6, 2026

I hate my phone. It’s a technological marvel that can fit into my pocket, and it makes me miserable. It’s attention seeking, focus grabbing, productivity stealing nature have not done well for my mental health.

That’s why I’m going to be using it less. Well, going to try to use it less.

The Why

People nowadays spend a lot of time on their phones, myself included. On average I get a daily screen on time of 4-5 hours. That’s a lot. That is time I could have spent playing with my kids, cleaning my house, or engaging in hobbies. It’s reasons like those that I decided I need to make a change to my phone usage habits. But doing this wasn't going to be easy, since we rely on our phones for so much.

The How

So how would I go about breaking my addiction to scrolling on my phone? My approach is to make it more boring as to entice myself to use it less. Well that’s the intent anyway.

The first step to making my phone more boring is to remove as many unnecessary apps as I can. This is always the first step to minimalizing one’s phone. I have usually been pretty selective with what apps I use, and this setup is no exception. If it can be used as a web app (within reason) I don’t install the app. By the end of my pruning I only have about 40 apps. That seems like a lot, but is little in comparison to what some 'minimalist' influencers keep.

The apps I did keep were only the important ones. Email for notifications on little one's school, My older kids' school app to keep in touch with their teachers, Notesnook to keep track of my thoughts. The rest are all built in apps that provide me with some degree of functionality. Intent is the word I'd use to describe these apps. They all intend to be useful, and are not just scrolling traps.

The next step is to turn the phone into a pseudo e-ink phone. To do this I utilize the accessibility settings to set the display into monochrome mode. This, paired with a matte screen protector, give a sort of pseudo e-ink look to my device. I keep an accessibility shortcut in my quick settings panel to turn it off, just in case my wife needs to borrow my phone.

The Results

Taking these few steps actually helped me cut my screen time down by half of what it used to be. It's a good start, but I still think I could shave more time off my screen usage. I think if I went even more minimal with my apps selection I could shave more time off, but I don't want to over do anything.

All in all I think this method to approaching technology is going to be beneficial to my mental health. It's one step closer to a healthier relationship with tech, and one step closer to me hating my phone less.