Maybe you failed Stoptober and continue to feel bad about it. Maybe Movember had its intention, but things never quite worked out; especially in the upper lip area. December was probably a wipeout period from day one. And the less said about Dry January, the better.
But a new month offers a new opportunity to embrace the recently invented calendar-themed self-care exercise. We abstained from smoking, shaving our upper lips, and drinking. We leave our phones now. More precisely, we are giving up our smartphones and completely replacing them with something simpler.
Welcome to “flip-phone February”. The good news is that we’re already six days in. The bad news is that you may be about to find basic, everyday life a lot harder. But it will be worth it in the end.
Rules
More importantly, the Flip-phone idea in February (an idea born in the US but gaining traction on both sides of the Atlantic) isn’t just about going without a phone for a month. Much of navigating the modern world depends not only on maintaining contact with people, but also on access to the internet.
Instead, the challenge is to reduce your dependence on your smartphone by significantly rolling back the apps and functions on your current phone, or going one step further and replacing your smartphone with a “dumbphone” (the increasingly trendy retrograde phone). Style phone with only basic apps and phone keypad.
As reactions against smartphone addiction grow, there are now dozens of such phones on the market. Most are rotary phones. It is much cheaper than most modern smartphones. And each one comes with a promise that when you pull it out at the bar, everyone at the table will want to ask you about it. (If Flip-phone February is anything like other themed months, you’ve probably already announced to everyone you know that you’re doing it, posted about it online, and scored at least 85 percent of your personality for the year.)
Practicalities
If you’re keeping your old phone and only removing time-wasting apps, check the usage section of your Settings app to see exactly where your time is going. The most likely culprits are social media apps and games; they may come first.
There may be news apps that ping notifications multiple times an hour, insist that even the most insignificant things are urgent breaking news, keep you scrolling through the front pages for 20 minutes, that you actually just stare at morning and evening. . Other than TelegramAlso delete the ones where it never wastes ping (no budge). The same can be done for email. This may be hard to justify, especially if your job depends on it, but consider whether you need to persistently mindlessly refresh your inbox and respond to questions within five minutes. Could you check your desktop every hour instead?
Once your phone goes back to basics or you replace your phone with a basic model, your habitual scrolling will become easier. But now it’s time to consider how your day might be affected in more subtle ways: getting around using map apps, parking apps, digital train tickets, paying using a mobile wallet, etc.
Many of these things can be vital (and in fact, some things can be nearly impossible without a specific app or QR code scanner), but the problem is usually alleviated by something simple: a little planning.
Tips and Tricks
Luddite life in 2024 is all about trial and error. But luckily there are online communities on sites like Reddit that act as support groups for everyone who joins. There people can share their progress or ask how others solved certain problems. No one is particularly prejudiced, which seems fortunate, and there’s a nice bit of flexibility: often people need to re-download a particular app, but then set a usage limit of 15 minutes per day to ensure the habit isn’t accidentally reinstated. .
Take a notepad with you, plan routes in advance, let people (especially family and a few colleagues know that you’ll be going semi-offline for a while to avoid turning the Flip-phone February into a P45 February)… The basic tips are obvious but worth following. No one needs a missing file opened for them just because they don’t post a video on Instagram every morning.
Otherwise, choose your fighter. Different “dumb phones” offer different amounts of stupidity; So for people who need, say, Google Maps or Spotify or Uber, there are phones that will offer that and not much else. Some have WhatsApp. And for those who really want to end 1997, there are dozens of varieties that will do nothing but make calls and text and whose batteries run out in the 22nd century.
Benefits
Britons are said to scroll more distance on their smartphones each month than the length of the Eiffel Tower: that’s 519 inches per day, or almost three miles per year. Research shows that many people spend more than five hours on their phones every day; That means staring at that little screen for months every year.
This clearly has devastating effects on the time available for other things, but also reduces sleep quality and attention span. Less well-known injuries include eye strain, “text paw” (bent hands and fingers from too much texting), earphones, dry eyes, and “cell phone elbow,” where users experience tingling or numbness in their fingers as a result of too much movement. too much phone time.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a switch to the Flip-phone in February, and dumb-phones often report having more free time, increased concentration, better energy levels, and (possibly) less neck pain. They may have been fired from their jobs too, but they will find out in March.