Life without a phone

One week ago, my three-year-old phone died. I’ve been living without one since. Here are some observations (not necessarily negative) of life without a phone:

1. I have to actively consume emails and messages.

   I don’t have push notifications turned on for Gmail or Messenger, so I have to go and check them manually on my computer. This has turned out to be quite an exciting event.

2. I don’t know what the weather is like.

   My phone had a weather widget on its home screen, so I knew exactly what temperature it was and whether it was going to rain soon.

3. I have to plan, make notes, and remember more about where I am going.

   I now need to write down what my booking reference is if I am collecting train tickets. If I need to go somewhere, I need to have a good idea of where it is before I set off.

4. I have to ask people to help me more.

   I wanted to take a train to a station that was not significant enough to be displayed on the boards, so I had to ask a real person – imagine the horror – when the next train was and from where it was leaving.

5. I cannot spend money with Monzo.

   I tried to use my Monzo card but it came back Unauthorized. I can only assume this is because Monzo has some security features that prevent my card from being used in a place that my phone isn’t. And my phone isn’t anywhere.

   If Monzo were my only bank account, could I purchase a replacement phone? This deadlock could become problematic.

6. I am uninterruptible.

   When I carry a phone, push notifications are able to distract me at any given moment. I feel that even the potential to be interrupted affects me, perhaps on a subconscious level: some background task is always running, preparing me for an interruption. Here is one study which supports this idea.

7. I waste less time (on my phone).

   I would often spend ~20 minutes browsing e.g. Hacker News on my phone without even realising it. Some of this behaviour has moved to my laptop, but I feel that a significant proportion of it has died with the phone. Though I have no empirical data, I’m sure I spend less time on the loo.

8. I currently have no second factor for certain logins.

   Most second factor logins only support time-based OTP, which use tokens generated by mobile apps like Google Authenticator. If I did not keep backup codes for these logins, I could be permanently locked out of them.

   Luckily my Google Account is also protected by a Yubikey which I can use to login. No such luck with my work’s AWS credentials.

9. I am less economically valuable.

   Smartphones produce an immense amount of data. If you own an Android phone, you can check https://myactivity.google.com/ to see precisely how much. They track where you have been, how long you have spent there, what apps you have opened, what articles in those apps you read, what you have searched for and many other bits.

   I assume this data is all fed into a plethora of machine learning algorithms to target ads to me. This data has value. If you stop producing this data, because your phone is broken, you are producing less value.

   There is also the idea that phones make people more productive (they can answer emails quicker, retrieve information quicker etc.) and not having a phone has hampered my productivity.

I currently have no plans to replace my phone: I’m still enjoying my simpler, less productive life without one.