I can ask my smartphone to respect my attention

If my phone is making me miserable my constantly nagging me for attention, surely the solution must be to ditch it and take a dumb phone that can only place calls and send texts?

Except calls are particularly intrusive interruptions, and the only texts I receive are from couriers. My family and friends use iMessage or Signal. And what about the pictures I can snap in a few seconds by pulling my phone from my pocket? What about GPS navigation? What about those parking lots where you can only pay with an app? What if I need to order a cab in a country I don’t speak the language of? What about using my phone app as a 2FA from the bank as the PSD2 practically requires?

I thought about using a dumb down smartphone like the Lite Phone III or any of the other dumbed-down Android phones. In practice it doesn’t work for me, because most of them either don’t let me use the apps I need or let me break out of the dumb mode to use the app. At this point, why using a dumbed down smartphone at all?

I don’t need a dumb(ed down smart)phone. I need the convenience of my smartphone, but I need to use intentionally instead of being dragged to it. My phone was already in silent mode all the time because I can’t stand being interrupted loudly by it unless it’s an actual emergency. But whenever a notification pops on the screen it brightens up, drags my attention to it, and even if I don’t want to interact with it it stays in the back of my head until I finally unlock the phone and have a look at what it’s all about.

What I was missing was a sense of priority for notifications. To stay focused on what I cared about, I needed my phone to hold back the unimportant notifications and tell me when something important happened. I could already deny some app the authorization to display notifications, but that’s a double edged sword. If I do so with messaging apps I end up compulsively checking them to see if I missed anything important.

What solved it for me was the Focus feature of the iPhone. Instead of using the Do Not Disturb mode, I’ve configured the Personal Focus profile. I configured it so

• No notifications at all appear on my screen.
• If my favorite contacts call me I will be notified.
• If someone calls me twice within three minutes it will bypass the protection.
• If an app has a Time Sensitive notification to send me, it will bypass the protection.

All the rest is filtered out. As a result I have a phone that doesn’t actively nag me for attention. Because it notifies me when something truly important happens, I don’t have to check it regularly out of Fear Of Missing Out. This tweak is part of a broader effort to reclaim my attention capacity.