Smartphones are a distraction. Numerous studies and research have proven out various scenarios: from students unable to learn as well, to laws prohibiting hands-on device use while driving, and the various apps and platforms that buzz, ping, and are designed to distract. People are looking at ways to solve this modern problem — from the dumb phone movement to companies creating phones with restraint and limits[1]. The options revolve around the actual device being limited. For some people, this may be a necessary route. Save for Messages and WhatsApp[2], and during work hours, Slack, I’ve never had notifications on for any social media apps or any other apps. But the problem lies further up the chain: the design of the device itself. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, it was indeed a much lauded moment in the category. Prior to this, phones came in a variety of form factors. They were as large as satellite phones, then became smaller foldables or slideables: a hybrid approach with a tactile physical mini-keyboard mated to a small screen. Palm introduced the Pilot series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996 with the Pilot 1000 and 5000, with mostly screen, driven primarily with a stylus. The iPhone truly revolutionized the industrial design and brought us to our current moment: a full-screen device that you could touch, tap, drag, and swipe to interact with. It brought down the wall that a keyboard or stylus blocked. We no longer needed the middleware. We could touch all the things! Prior to this, screens were large and encumbered. Classic TVs were housed in cabinets and were more furniture than centerpieces. They’ve become slimmer and larger over the decades but for the most part are still primarily active devices. One turns on a TV to watch something. A TV doesn’t necessarily reach out to you. It’s a consumption device. It generally is turned off. Now, a small screen, or a larger one as a tablet, sits positioned. A phone is usually on, 24/7, 365 days a year. A person may choose to have it in a cradle propped up for display. Screens and battery have made it such that always-on is a feature, and no longer a decision. It acts as a supposed gateway to connection: access to the broader world as you know it. I place mine face down. When possible, I tuck it away[3]. And I even leave it at home when I know I want peace and solitude: on a run, climbing, spending time with friends and family. My attention is focused. The phone disrupts that. In the last two years, even that wasn’t quite enough and I started to research what proponents of limited or dumb phones were looking for: Limited access to apps or inability to install most distraction-designed or attention-grabbing apps. E-ink or black-and-white displays. Basic core apps: phone, messaging, calendar, contacts, sometimes a camera, book/reader apps. No notifications. Those were the common ones that stood out to me the most. We have the ability to organize our home screens. And while Android users have been blessed with the ultimate in customization over the years, it’s only been recently that iOS users have been able to hack and then customize their screens. Prior to iOS 18, I attempted my first real foray into a minimalist phone. This worked quite well, but what you don't see is the second screen. It was still chock full of apps and folders. I was still going over there more often than not. And then came iOS 18. The answer for me ultimately was born out of my own Mac desktop and how I've set that up. I hide the Dock, collapse and stack all files and folders, and use Spotlight, and only very recently Raycast, to get to my apps. If I need it, I’ll launch it. Otherwise, I don’t see options for apps I’m not actively using. Porting this approach to my phone, I wondered if Spotlight on iOS would do the trick, coupled with relegating everything to the App Library. I settled on two home screens. The first is my general core apps. Very basic things: Settings, WhatsApp, NetNewsWire, Ivory, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera. Default dock contains Messages, Mail, Safari, and Bear. The second is my work/reference screen with two bonus “in test” apps: Claude, Slack, YouTube, Retro, Uppercase (disclaimer: I am the founding designer), Touchstone (climbing gym membership bookmark for entry), Pixelfed, Tapestry (testing), and Art of Fauna (testing/playing). I’ve been using this for a few weeks now, and it’s been great. Previously, I could never remember where I put some app I don’t access regularly and have to hunt around in folders for them. Swiping down to search for them is far more natural (and faster, especially if it’s a particularly unused one) and if used enough or recently, is listed right at the top. And you can always swipe between recent apps as well. I really have to remember to trigger an app that I used to just tap because it was there, like so many empty calories. If you have to, set app limits. I reduced my Instagram visits tenfold last year by setting a 5-minute time limit on it, and the prompts got annoying enough that I’d just stop. You do have to be an active participant in that decision; otherwise, it’s easy to “Allow for today”, but it’s a good reminder of why you implemented it. Today, I’m just about to leave Instagram altogether because of Meta. Short of getting a limited device, see what you can do with giving your phone a deep cleaning, and rearrange or purge that furniture you’ve been hanging onto for no good reason. I personally dig surveying this category of devices: Light Phone, Punkt, etc. ↩︎ For my family abroad. WhatsApp is widely used in Asia, and elsewhere. From restaurant reservations, to general inquiries, all the way to recently using Cathay Pacific’s customer service business chat when we flew from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur via Hong Kong, it’s a compromise I’ve made to stay in touch with them. We used Signal for a bit, but it was difficult to get them to adopt it. ↩︎ I don’t even carry it in my pocket these days, opting to stash in a small bag or such. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

A blog turns out to be an education undertaken in public. Its proprietor is more student than teacher, and one is fortunate to encounter numerous tutors along the way, between the covers of books and out there in the bigger world. I seldom sit down at the keyboard with the goal of instructing you, like a pompous schoolmarm. More often I want to share something – a book you might enjoy and a sense of the pleasure it has already given me, or some new nugget of knowledge. I would continue reading and writing without you, but you make the experience more rewarding. Here is a 1958 entry in Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014):  “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.”   With the proviso that “experience”  and "every possible situation" include “book learning,” I agree. It’s an old paradox, one the Greeks left us, but the older we get and the more we learn, the more we come to recognize our ignorance. In other words, “adult education” is redundant. Dr. Johnson might be describing the care and feeding of a blog when he writes in The Rambler on July 9, 1751:   “The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.”   Anecdotal Evidence today celebrates its nineteenth anniversary. Each day since February 5, 2006, I have posted something except during the hiatus following spinal surgery in 2019. Now, with a renewed backbone, it’s time to get to work.

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Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another. And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words,… read article