The watch idea is interesting. Do you really never miss having a camera with you? And is the battery life good enough that you can wear it while sleeping for sleep quality, resting heart rate, etc tracking?
More generally, there are two categories of things a smartphone does:
1. Stuff that takes your attention away from the physical world you're present in and turns it toward the phone, the virtual world, and/or your own ruminations. This is IMO where ~all of the bad effects come from.
2. Stuff that actually makes your interactions with the physical world you're present in nicer, easier, lower-friction, etc. Very often this means stuff that replaces, and usually improves upon, the functions of gadgets that upper-middle-class people forty years ago bought separately and carried around in purses, backpacks, etc. Or in some cases, gadgets that were too big even for a purse or backpack.
There's a *lot* in category (2), with camera functionality close to the head of the list, and a very long tail of special-purpose apps, most of which aren't (yet) available for watches. And that's what makes me think trying this would be a significant quality-of-life downgrade, at least for me. Any one of those miniaturized-and-combined gadgets is going to be used only on a small percentage of trips out and about, but it's pretty common to want at least one of them. That and I hate voice interfaces, so none of the Siri workarounds you list would be attractive to me.
So the dual question to this is whether it's possible to adjust the set of apps on your phone to basically only be the category (2) stuff. I have tried variants of this and not done a great job, but your post inspires me to try harder at that, because the problem you're addressing here is real.
For photographs, I think some degree of photo-taking has value, but excessive use of cameras can be a distraction from the real world almost as much as reading websites. My current solution is just that I'm not taking many photos. I kind of like having an excuse not to.
I considered getting a small pocket digital camera, but it seems that that category is basically dead now, since smartphones took the market.
Beyond cameras, most of the "miniature gadgets" I found useful work great on the watch. Weather, calendar, calculator, tides, walkie talkie, tickets, alarms, shopping list, etc. I used to hate voice interfaces, and they can still be annoying at times (Siri is terrible at recognizing street names) but I'm liking them more now that I'm getting more used to them.
What other gadgets do you think are important?
There are definitely some things it's still really useful to have a smartphone for, so I still carry my phone with me sometimes, but the fact I usually don't have it is enough to break the habit of checking it.
I tend to use both photos and short videos to document random stuff I want to remember-- "ooh that artist's work looks cool", "I parked the car in section D7, level 4 of the parking garage", "that's a weird noise/weather phenomenon, I wonder what it is", etc. I could dictate short descriptions to a watch instead, but that's much less information dense.
And of course these days if one wishes to document e.g. a protest and any police responses to that protest, one needs readily available video. On a related note, there is AFAICT no Signal app for Apple Watch.
Beyond that, it's just a long tail of stuff that I could plausibly want while out and about-- some transport- and travel-related, as you note; some music-related (yes there are metronome and tuner apps for the Apple Watch but TE Tuner is waaaaay better); some very random (air quality, recipes, remote household monitoring etc). Certainly the percentage of times I am out of the house when I really need one of those is far from 100%, and I could just try and remember to have my phone with me whenever I know I'm going to need it. But that's a lot of cognitive burden compared to keeping the well-established habit of having the thing in my pocket so I never need to worry whether I've forgotten it!
I do think there is a technologically feasible evolution of the watch that I would accept as a phone replacement. Figure out a way to put in even a very bad camera by today's standards, get a bigger critical mass of users so that a longer tail of app developers finds it a worthwhile platform, and that'd about do it. I hope someone makes that device soon.
Yeah. There are definitely some limitations to what you can do with a watch today. I think part of the challenge is that watches today are mostly designed on the assumption that most people also carry a phone, but I I'd expect that to change as more people go phoneless and watch only.
In my case, I do carry my phone with me when going on "long or unpredictable trips", but that isn't a particularly common case, at least for me. For the standard stuff like being in the house, taking kids to/from school, going to shops, and visiting friends, I don't really need it. In my case I work remotely from home, but I assume if I worked at an office I'd bring it with me and then stick it on a charger at my desk.
Having a camera on the watch seems like an obviously useful thing to have and something I can imagine happening in the future.
As you and another commenter point out, the key problem to me is the inability to be fully immersed in any activity because of either real (notifications) or perceived (let me check if there's anything interesting) interruptions to activities we are doing in "real" life.
Therefore, one corollary is that it is ok to be doing anything, provided you are fully immersed in it and do it for an uninterrupted length of time. From this perspective, reading a long article or ebook or newspaper on the phone is not the problem, but scrolling topics, going in and out of apps, interrupting a walk you take to look at your phone is the problem.
So I wonder if interrupting yourself to do some of these activities on the watch instead is really solving the problem. I love the idea of keeping the phone away and reaching for the phone intentionally and maybe only at certain times of day when your "main" activity is on the phone, as opposed to reaching for it automatically when your main activity is something else.
You ask some good questions. What is it that's so bad about phones? Why is it worse to look at a phone than to glance at the time on a wristwatch, or to read a book? Why is it worse to use a phone than to do work on your laptop?
I think one problem is that the stuff people look at on their phones is often social media, which is often really terrible for you (I worked on Integrity at Facebook). But even if the stuff you are reading is harmless, you are allowing it to fill up the attention that you would otherwise be paying to the people around you.
One reason books and laptops aren't harmful in this way is that they are inherently not great for snacking on - you want an extended period of time to read a book or do work on your laptop, so it doesn't absorb every moment of spare time in the way a phone can.
I think the reason why watches aren't harmful is that they don't suck you it. I might glance at my watch to see if a message that just came in was important, but if it's hard to get sucked into reading everything in the conversation.
I rarely look at my watch for longer than a second at a time, and then I'm back to engaging with the real world. That's different to pulling out my phone and finding myself drawn into reading my email, or reading a long WhatsApp conversation, or reading social media.
Hi Rob! Just read this and wanted to say thanks for writing it.
I recently finished Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, which also makes a strong case for extracting yourself as much as possible from the attention economy. Just like how watching an old movie now feels shocking because everyone’s smoking, I think we’ll someday look back at this era and wonder how we functioned when no one could focus. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to recenter more on the people around us and less on the things that corporations want us to pay attention to. But it takes articles like yours to help start that shift.
One thing that’s made a big difference for me is dropping online news entirely. I still follow the news, but only in print. Even reputable outlets can’t resist clickbait or subtle design tricks to keep you scrolling, and all that vanishes on paper. It’s a "slower" experience, but ironically, I spend much less time on it than before.
Yeah. I think most online news is pretty much just as bad as social media - driven by the same engagement incentives.
I just read the book "Trust my I'm lying" and it makes the case that the problem isn't print vs online but ad-funded vs subscription-based. The yellow press of the past was print-based but almost as bad as modern ad funded social medial. What made newspapers become better was the switch to a subscription model where there was a greater incentive to build long term trust.
So, with that in mind, I haven't stopped reading all online news, but I have limited my news reading to a small set of Substacks I subscribe to and trust to be thoughtful and fair. Even then, I try to limit myself to reading my substack subscriptions once a week.
The watch idea is interesting. Do you really never miss having a camera with you? And is the battery life good enough that you can wear it while sleeping for sleep quality, resting heart rate, etc tracking?
More generally, there are two categories of things a smartphone does:
1. Stuff that takes your attention away from the physical world you're present in and turns it toward the phone, the virtual world, and/or your own ruminations. This is IMO where ~all of the bad effects come from.
2. Stuff that actually makes your interactions with the physical world you're present in nicer, easier, lower-friction, etc. Very often this means stuff that replaces, and usually improves upon, the functions of gadgets that upper-middle-class people forty years ago bought separately and carried around in purses, backpacks, etc. Or in some cases, gadgets that were too big even for a purse or backpack.
There's a *lot* in category (2), with camera functionality close to the head of the list, and a very long tail of special-purpose apps, most of which aren't (yet) available for watches. And that's what makes me think trying this would be a significant quality-of-life downgrade, at least for me. Any one of those miniaturized-and-combined gadgets is going to be used only on a small percentage of trips out and about, but it's pretty common to want at least one of them. That and I hate voice interfaces, so none of the Siri workarounds you list would be attractive to me.
So the dual question to this is whether it's possible to adjust the set of apps on your phone to basically only be the category (2) stuff. I have tried variants of this and not done a great job, but your post inspires me to try harder at that, because the problem you're addressing here is real.
I think you make a good observation.
For photographs, I think some degree of photo-taking has value, but excessive use of cameras can be a distraction from the real world almost as much as reading websites. My current solution is just that I'm not taking many photos. I kind of like having an excuse not to.
I considered getting a small pocket digital camera, but it seems that that category is basically dead now, since smartphones took the market.
Beyond cameras, most of the "miniature gadgets" I found useful work great on the watch. Weather, calendar, calculator, tides, walkie talkie, tickets, alarms, shopping list, etc. I used to hate voice interfaces, and they can still be annoying at times (Siri is terrible at recognizing street names) but I'm liking them more now that I'm getting more used to them.
What other gadgets do you think are important?
There are definitely some things it's still really useful to have a smartphone for, so I still carry my phone with me sometimes, but the fact I usually don't have it is enough to break the habit of checking it.
I tend to use both photos and short videos to document random stuff I want to remember-- "ooh that artist's work looks cool", "I parked the car in section D7, level 4 of the parking garage", "that's a weird noise/weather phenomenon, I wonder what it is", etc. I could dictate short descriptions to a watch instead, but that's much less information dense.
And of course these days if one wishes to document e.g. a protest and any police responses to that protest, one needs readily available video. On a related note, there is AFAICT no Signal app for Apple Watch.
Beyond that, it's just a long tail of stuff that I could plausibly want while out and about-- some transport- and travel-related, as you note; some music-related (yes there are metronome and tuner apps for the Apple Watch but TE Tuner is waaaaay better); some very random (air quality, recipes, remote household monitoring etc). Certainly the percentage of times I am out of the house when I really need one of those is far from 100%, and I could just try and remember to have my phone with me whenever I know I'm going to need it. But that's a lot of cognitive burden compared to keeping the well-established habit of having the thing in my pocket so I never need to worry whether I've forgotten it!
I do think there is a technologically feasible evolution of the watch that I would accept as a phone replacement. Figure out a way to put in even a very bad camera by today's standards, get a bigger critical mass of users so that a longer tail of app developers finds it a worthwhile platform, and that'd about do it. I hope someone makes that device soon.
Yeah. There are definitely some limitations to what you can do with a watch today. I think part of the challenge is that watches today are mostly designed on the assumption that most people also carry a phone, but I I'd expect that to change as more people go phoneless and watch only.
In my case, I do carry my phone with me when going on "long or unpredictable trips", but that isn't a particularly common case, at least for me. For the standard stuff like being in the house, taking kids to/from school, going to shops, and visiting friends, I don't really need it. In my case I work remotely from home, but I assume if I worked at an office I'd bring it with me and then stick it on a charger at my desk.
Having a camera on the watch seems like an obviously useful thing to have and something I can imagine happening in the future.
As you and another commenter point out, the key problem to me is the inability to be fully immersed in any activity because of either real (notifications) or perceived (let me check if there's anything interesting) interruptions to activities we are doing in "real" life.
Therefore, one corollary is that it is ok to be doing anything, provided you are fully immersed in it and do it for an uninterrupted length of time. From this perspective, reading a long article or ebook or newspaper on the phone is not the problem, but scrolling topics, going in and out of apps, interrupting a walk you take to look at your phone is the problem.
So I wonder if interrupting yourself to do some of these activities on the watch instead is really solving the problem. I love the idea of keeping the phone away and reaching for the phone intentionally and maybe only at certain times of day when your "main" activity is on the phone, as opposed to reaching for it automatically when your main activity is something else.
You ask some good questions. What is it that's so bad about phones? Why is it worse to look at a phone than to glance at the time on a wristwatch, or to read a book? Why is it worse to use a phone than to do work on your laptop?
I think one problem is that the stuff people look at on their phones is often social media, which is often really terrible for you (I worked on Integrity at Facebook). But even if the stuff you are reading is harmless, you are allowing it to fill up the attention that you would otherwise be paying to the people around you.
One reason books and laptops aren't harmful in this way is that they are inherently not great for snacking on - you want an extended period of time to read a book or do work on your laptop, so it doesn't absorb every moment of spare time in the way a phone can.
I think the reason why watches aren't harmful is that they don't suck you it. I might glance at my watch to see if a message that just came in was important, but if it's hard to get sucked into reading everything in the conversation.
I rarely look at my watch for longer than a second at a time, and then I'm back to engaging with the real world. That's different to pulling out my phone and finding myself drawn into reading my email, or reading a long WhatsApp conversation, or reading social media.
Hi Rob! Just read this and wanted to say thanks for writing it.
I recently finished Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, which also makes a strong case for extracting yourself as much as possible from the attention economy. Just like how watching an old movie now feels shocking because everyone’s smoking, I think we’ll someday look back at this era and wonder how we functioned when no one could focus. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to recenter more on the people around us and less on the things that corporations want us to pay attention to. But it takes articles like yours to help start that shift.
One thing that’s made a big difference for me is dropping online news entirely. I still follow the news, but only in print. Even reputable outlets can’t resist clickbait or subtle design tricks to keep you scrolling, and all that vanishes on paper. It’s a "slower" experience, but ironically, I spend much less time on it than before.
Anyway, hope you’re doing well!
-Blair
Yeah. I think most online news is pretty much just as bad as social media - driven by the same engagement incentives.
I just read the book "Trust my I'm lying" and it makes the case that the problem isn't print vs online but ad-funded vs subscription-based. The yellow press of the past was print-based but almost as bad as modern ad funded social medial. What made newspapers become better was the switch to a subscription model where there was a greater incentive to build long term trust.
So, with that in mind, I haven't stopped reading all online news, but I have limited my news reading to a small set of Substacks I subscribe to and trust to be thoughtful and fair. Even then, I try to limit myself to reading my substack subscriptions once a week.
get the ultra, no more battery anxiety. i have a similar phone free workflow.