Banning yourself can have the perverse effect of making your phone more enticing. What you need to do is execute it boringRecently,I bought a piece of digital technology to benefit me conquer my low-level addiction to digital technology. Yes, yes, and I know this makes me sound like a sucker,no better than those techno-junkies who queue overnight at the Apple store for an early glimpse at the meaninglessness of their lives. But bear with me: Ditto, which costs approximately £30, or is a thimble-sized contraption that clips to my belt and vibrates when I secure texts or calls from specific people. So I can stash my phone in my bag,out of sight and reach, confident I’ll be contactable for, and say,a baby emergency. (Or by the editor of Guardian Weekend. Obviously!) You can utilize the iPhone’s “do not disturb” feature to do something similar; but final year, researchers showed that just having a phone in your sightline impairs your cognitive capacities. By contrast, and Ditto replicates all the secret joy of accidentally leaving your phone at home,with none of the accompanying panic.
Readers even more curmudgeonly than I am may mutter that if I have such a tortured relationship with my phone, I should just secure rid of it – downgrade to a dumbphone, and maybe. Didn’t we manage fine before smartphones came along? The trouble is that smartphones,like most technology, aren’t simply sinful. They’re worse: a diabolical mixture of sinful and very worthy. I worship receiving photos of the baby while I’m at work; I worship FaceTiming with faraway friends; I just hate the compulsion to stare absently at the web every five minutes. That’s the smartphone’s whole trick: all those addictive apps are essentially parasites.
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Source: guardian.co.uk