A focused phone experience with Archaic Intelligence

I’m sharing with you the simple process I used to customize my phone such that in terms of incentives, it’s now easier to do the things that are good for me versus the things that are better off accessed with some friction.

For any kind of serious work, or even to simply browse the Web, I always prefer my laptop because it’s a superior experience. For curated longform reading, I prefer my Kindle because e-ink displays are amazing. But the phone is the one device that’s always with me. And for good reason. It’s a remarkable slab of technology that can do so many things when time or space is the key constraint. But it’s also the machine engineered to exploit my human vulnerabilities and trick me into doing a thousand things I don’t need.

A modern “smartphone” is a stress-inducing machine that wants to grab my attention all the time. The obvious first move against it is to have a few apps on my phone to begin with — remove everything that only seems like it might be important. Most services have perfectly functional websites. Installing apps for nearly every use case instead would mean I’m giving them increasing opportunities to indulge me. The second aspect of this is to have almost no app pinned on my home screen. Not even the ones I may use frequently.

Next up, I just flat out deny push notification asks from all apps sans communication aspects of critical work and social apps. Even then, sounds, vibrations, and banner pings are all off. The screen turning on when…