In general, you should be open to having more electronic devices that only do one thing: I know it seems dumb when your phone or laptop can already do the thing, but it really does change how you relate to the activity.
I’d be curious to hear some examples on this subject: things you’ve tested out and found helpful / not helpful in the long-term.
I’ve had a similar idea as a means of keeping my brain in a more Quiet state: it’s a bit of a meme to talk about the progress made by computers and phones rendering other tools obsolete, but it has been helpful for me to explore selectively “unbundling the phone” by thinking of use cases through the lens of “sure my phone can do this, but would I be less prone to interruption if I used a separate tool?”
The main example that has stuck around for me is using a separate alarm clock, and sleeping with my phone in another room.
Kindle is the clear winner for me specifically. I often want to read right before bed, where having an eInk rather than LCD and the shift away from the noise machine are both at their most important.
I’d love to have a dedicated music player again, especially one that cooperated with Google Music on the back end to refresh locally available options while I was away from WiFi. I looked into this a tiny bit and couldn’t find anything that I liked. I could make it myself from an old phone but it hasn’t felt worth that much effort.
I found the Freewrite Traveller (eInk word processor) merely okay, but several of my friends love theirs. A different friend loves his reMarkable (eInk notebook).
I’ve kept my iPad strictly for art and movies, no social apps. The art part only works so well because I often work from youtube tutorials, so the laptop is still open. For movies it does seem like an improvement over the laptop in terms of focus, except that I can’t speed them up.
The display on the cardio machine I use broke, and I bought an egg timer to time HIIT intervals rather than use my phone, even though I use my phone to listen to podcasts while I’m working out, and it was totally worth the $8.
+1 to Kindle; I went from “Man, I used to read a lot during high school, now I just browse the internet” to reading more than 25 books per year when I bought one.
I’d be curious to hear some examples on this subject: things you’ve tested out and found helpful / not helpful in the long-term.
I’ve had a similar idea as a means of keeping my brain in a more Quiet state: it’s a bit of a meme to talk about the progress made by computers and phones rendering other tools obsolete, but it has been helpful for me to explore selectively “unbundling the phone” by thinking of use cases through the lens of “sure my phone can do this, but would I be less prone to interruption if I used a separate tool?”
The main example that has stuck around for me is using a separate alarm clock, and sleeping with my phone in another room.
Kindle is the clear winner for me specifically. I often want to read right before bed, where having an eInk rather than LCD and the shift away from the noise machine are both at their most important.
I’d love to have a dedicated music player again, especially one that cooperated with Google Music on the back end to refresh locally available options while I was away from WiFi. I looked into this a tiny bit and couldn’t find anything that I liked. I could make it myself from an old phone but it hasn’t felt worth that much effort.
I found the Freewrite Traveller (eInk word processor) merely okay, but several of my friends love theirs. A different friend loves his reMarkable (eInk notebook).
I’ve kept my iPad strictly for art and movies, no social apps. The art part only works so well because I often work from youtube tutorials, so the laptop is still open. For movies it does seem like an improvement over the laptop in terms of focus, except that I can’t speed them up.
The display on the cardio machine I use broke, and I bought an egg timer to time HIIT intervals rather than use my phone, even though I use my phone to listen to podcasts while I’m working out, and it was totally worth the $8.
+1 to Kindle; I went from “Man, I used to read a lot during high school, now I just browse the internet” to reading more than 25 books per year when I bought one.
I use an iPod to listen to music—highly recommend it.