My life has been hijacked by my smartphone. In some ways it's my fault, because I made a series of incremental choices that led me here, but in many ways it's not my fault, because each individual choice wasn't unreasonable. How could my poor primitive primate¹ brain possibly know what it was getting itself in for?

The 2025 Smartphones in Education (SIE) report suggests that "the average student now spends 5.5 hours per day on their phone-equivalent to 25 years of their lifetime", and perhaps more strikingly, "68% want to reduce [their] phone usage" but presumably feel unable to.

My numbers aren't quite that bad, but they're still really bad, and I'm 30 and supposed to be in control of my life in a way that adolescents aren't. So what am I doing about it?

Muscle memory

What I'm complaining about are my own bad habits, and it's interesting just how unconscious these are. My mind can be entirely elsewhere but I can still unlock my phone and open an app with zero conscious effort - it's baked-in muscle memory. Fingerprint readers and facial recognition unlock have facilitated this; it's easier than ever to unlock your phone without having to engage any mental faculties.

Recognising that these are habits is helpful because it gives us the tools to fight them, and that is to interrupt them.

Add friction

It's very difficult to make it impossible to access Facebook, or LinkedIn, or BBC News on a smart-phone - but you don't need to make it impossible, you just need to interrupt the habit and give your conscious brain the chance to object. So I've uninstalled my worst offending apps² and blocked their web equivalents using uBlock Origin on my phone's web browser.

Now, when my muscle memory gets me unlocking my phone and opening something that wastes my life away, I am interrupted for just long enough to be slightly disgusted with myself. I am incredibly grateful for this disgust, because it is negative enough to prevent me from just working around the simple block that I've implemented.

Is it worth the sacrifices?

This isn't perfect. I want to know what's going on in the world, and blocking my news outlets prevents me from doing so. I want to hear about peoples caving discoveries on UKCaving and Buddle Pit, and that's harder for me now. There are sacrifices to be made with this, but they're not that substantial. Ultimately, I'm happy to be making them, because I think it's making me happier, and healthier, and more interested, and more interesting.

I think "screen time" (particularly "phone screen time") is quite a nice loss function to be trying to target, because it doesn't have that many negative consequences. Even if I stopped using my phone entirely I don't think my life would look all that different - there would just be some more areas of inconvenience.

It's personal

So if I could ditch my smart phone entirely, why don't I? Because I don't want to. Life isn't black and white, and smart phones aren't either good or bad, they are tools that can be used in good ways and ways that have negative side-effects. I want to be able to message my friends sometimes, and get driving directions to places I've not been before, and check my bank balance easily.

The trick is working out what you're comfortable using your phone for, and deciding that you're not going to use it for everything else.

My personal target is to consistently get below 30 mins per day of screen time. That still feels like a massive proportion of my waking life looking at a phone screen, but if I'm messaging friends, paying my bills, and expanding my brain with wacky projects like The Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis then I can accept that it's not wasted time, and might actually be enhancing my life.

That's my ultimate goal really - to live a better/happier/more fulfilling life.

Footnotes

¹ Ooh, that's redundant, isn't it? How etymologically satisfying! ² On many Android phones actually uninstalling this social bloatware is very difficult, as they live in a protected directory so can only be disabled not uninstalled. I don't know whether this is because Android (i.e. Google) bake tracking into these apps, or have some financial arrangement with the social media companies, but it's another example of how the default option has become losing hours of your life to your smart phone, and you have to work hard to opt out.