The play phone

Having a son has made me much more conscious of how I spend my time. Not just because there's less of it that's entirely mine, but because there's now someone watching what I do with it.

Nowhere has that been more obvious than with my phone.

I love technology, I love the iPhone, and I enjoy social media. But I find social media becomes too consuming really quickly, and with those apps readily available it is all too easy to pick up your phone to reply to a friend, and then find yourself spending half an hour scrolling.

I already notice just how much he takes in of his surroundings, and I don't want him to look up from whatever he's doing and see me absent-mindedly polishing a piece of glass with my thumb.

My love of technology means I also love the re-emergence of dumb phones (and intentional technology in general - bring back the iPod!). The Minimal Phone 2 looks incredible and I almost joined their Kickstarter campaign. I nearly bought an old Nokia until I learned that WhatsApp was no longer supported. I love e-ink, and think it does a brilliant job at reducing so many of the distracting UI elements that are so common today.

But all of these solutions require you to give up more than I felt I needed to, and I started to appreciate that the device isn't the problem. An iPhone out of the box has no social media on it. I created those accounts and installed those apps myself. The device for me wasn't the issue.

The iPhone is great. Maps, an incredible camera, Apple Pay, messaging and FaceTime, music. These are all powerful features that we're incredibly lucky to be able to carry around with us in one device, and they're all things that I didn't particularly want to compromise on. An old phone would remove the distractions, but leave me without Apple Pay. An e-ink device would make Instagram look less appealing, but it would have the same effect on photos I'd taken or received. And here's the thing. I didn't necessarily want to use social media less. I just wanted to stop using it unintentionally.

The solution I'm therefore trialling now is a twist on the work phone. I have a play phone.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a second-hand iPhone SE for £50 (essentially the cost of one of those physical brick devices to try and reduce screen time). It's tiny, the battery life isn't great, and the screen isn't OLED so it feels like I can see the pixels. I've installed all the fun apps onto it; X, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook. All the things that occasionally surface something interesting or genuine from a friend, but all too often lead to endless lost hours. I've also now removed all of these from my main phone.

The beauty of this approach is that I'm still in complete control. I could carry this second device around with me and scroll as much as I'd like. But the older device (combined with it being another thing altogether) introduces a little bit of friction that more often than not stops me. Leaving the house, it stays here. Going to bed, it remains in my office. Occasionally if we're relaxing in an evening and just watching some mindless TV, it comes out and lets me catch up.

That small physical boundary has, so far, been enough. My screen time is down considerably, but I don't feel like I've given anything up. I'm still on Instagram. I can still see what my friends are doing, waste some time on Reddit, or catch up on X. I just now feel like I'm in better control of when I choose to do it.

We've used work phones for years to create a boundary between work and the rest of our lives. The play phone is the same idea in reverse.

The internet is still there. It's just not always in my pocket. And it leaves more time for playing with toy cars and lego. Which I think is how it should be.