I'm Breaking Up With My iPhone (and you should too)
About a month ago, I left my office to grab lunch with someone. Five minutes into the drive, I realized my phone was still sitting back on my desk. No time to turn around.
In that moment, I had a revelation… I didn't actually need it. I knew how to get there without directions. I'd already confirmed I'd show up. There was nothing on that phone that the next two hours required of me.
And yet I felt like I'd left a limb behind.
Those two hours were genuinely unsettling. Aimless. Anxious. Disconnected. Then I caught myself feeling that way, recognized how absurd it was to be rattled by the absence of a small glass rectangle for 120 minutes, and that's when it really got uncomfortable. Because it raised a question I'd been avoiding: was this why I almost never felt present anymore?
I thought I was already doing this right
For years I've struggled to feel present in big chunks of daily life. Owning a business makes it hard to "turn it off" when the workday ends. The always-on, always-available work culture in this country makes it worse. Then you drop an internet-connected dopamine machine in your pocket, and focus, presence, and the ability to actually relax don't stand a chance.
What stings is that I genuinely believed I had this handled.
I've had notifications off for everything except calls and texts for over a decade. Years ago, I deleted the worst offenders: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. I've been on a total news blackout for more than a year.
And I was still reaching for my phone every couple of minutes for most of my waking hours.
Killing the beeps and boops wasn't enough. I'd just refresh Slack. Check LinkedIn. Read texts. Delete a spam voicemail. Check email. Clear the unread call log. Repeat. The notifications were gone, but the habit had outlived them. My thumb didn't need a reason anymore.
Clearly, the gentle approach had failed. Time for something blunter.
The two changes that cut my casual phone use in half
After a couple of weeks of chewing on that lunch experience, I decided to sever the ridiculous connection my brain had built to an Apple product. I experimented with a bunch of things and landed on two changes that were simple to do and did most of the work. So far, they've cut my casual phone use by more than half.
1. A "Focus" mode that runs 24/7.
I built a new Focus mode set to "Only allow calls from contacts." That kills every spam call. (And no, "Silence Unknown Callers" is not the answer. It just buries the calls into a list you then feel compelled to clear, complete with a red badge on your Phone icon. Garbage.)
Into that Focus mode, I added a short, hand-picked list of people whose texts are actually allowed to punch through and notify me. Everyone else can wait until I choose to look.
2. The phone goes in a drawer when I'm home.
Drawers are impulse kryptonite. They hide the phone from view and force you to take a physical action to get it. That tiny bit of friction is enough to make your brain stop and ask the only question that matters: "Do I really need to look at my phone right now?"
Most of the time, the answer is no.
Where I'm stuck (and where I want to go)
This is a work in progress, and I want even more distance between me and the device. If you try this, you'll run into the same two walls I did.
First, most people need to be reachable in an emergency. Parents especially. We killed the office line and the home phone years ago (everyone just uses a cell now), which means your one personal number is load-bearing in a way it never used to be. One possible fix is a cellular Apple Watch, locked all the way down. I haven't tried it yet, but it's on the list.
Second, you don't realize how much you genuinely need the phone until you try to put it down. GPS. Two-factor codes. The thousand little life-admin tasks that quietly assume a smartphone is in your hand. You're constantly forced to pick it up just to function, which is exactly why the Focus mode matters. Sometimes you really do need the thing nearby. You just don't need it open.
I'm not the only one (here's what readers sent me)
When I first wrote about this, I got more replies than I've seen in a long time. Turns out a lot of us are quietly fed up with our phones. A few of the best comments and resources people shared:
→"Peter, I'm with you on the phones. You should check dumb.co out!" — Jay M.
→"Awesome authenticity on the phone issue. I'm dropping the iPhone and going to this: wisephone.com." — Tim P.
→"Same wavelength. I recommend turning off all your app badge notifications if you haven't already — squashes the impulse to open apps just to clear the red badge." — Bryce B.
Bryce is right, by the way. The red badge is its own little tyrant.
Then there was Daniel, who did the thing I keep circling but haven't committed to:
→"In 2024 I did a 30-day fast from my smartphone. I literally switched my number to a dumb phone. It was shockingly difficult — not because of my personal life, but because of things like my bank requiring an authenticator app. A couple of things that work for me: my personal cell is ONLY for personal use. I use VOIP for company stuff and only access it as needed. I use Boomerang to pause my inbox, and NO emails go to my phone. One of my life goals is to have a life simple enough that I can carry a dumb phone." — Daniel M.
That last line stuck with me.
A few more "give me back my focus" resources readers passed along:
Commodore (yes, the Commodore 64 brand) just announced a flip phone that blocks social media and browsers.
Jon Matzner wrote about his fully-analog morning brief. He pulls it off the printer and reads it in the front yard over coffee. (Just San Diego things.)
And one guy gave his 6-year-old an iPhone. It's not what you think. Check it out (I love this).
The whole point
Strip away the tactics, and here's what I'm actually after: I'm sick of my phone. I don't want it the way I've been wanting it.
I want to enjoy the people I'm with. And when I'm alone, I want to enjoy the solitude, - to fully sink into whatever I'm doing, even if that's doing nothing at all.
The drawer and the Focus mode are just the start. If you've found something that works, send it my way. I'm clearly still figuring this out.