My Simple Phone: 6 Tips to Humanize Your Smartphone

I have never been one to fall entirely into the pro or anti-technology camp. It’s clear to me that technology is a powerful tool with a lot of upsides and plenty of downsides, too.

It can make your life easier and open opportunities that never existed (fewer shopping trips, video calls with distant relatives, navigation in unknown places, capturing memories wherever you go, tracking your fitness, or following your favorite content creators— to name a few examples). 

But technology—and I’m thinking specifically about smartphones now—can also be a huge distraction from everyday life. You might become addicted to checking your favorite social media sites, anxious that you’re missing out on something else, or constantly pulled from the task at hand by the ping of a new notification. 

I encourage you not to fall for the propaganda that you are a pawn caught up in forces beyond your control.

Sure, big tech companies are trying to make a profit, and politicians are pushing their agendas, but you are a human with free will, and it’s up to you to decide how you’ll use technology.

It might be tempting to imagine utopian worlds where either we return to a beautiful agrarian past or technology arrives to remove all of the frustrations and pains of modern life—but that’s not going to happen. I believe we should all embrace the age we live in and get on with the work of making the best of what we have. It’s only through this work that we can pass along a better world for our children and grandchildren.

The work I’m talking about is the kind that everyone is called to do: coming to terms with the trade-offs involved in life and making choices that reflect our values. For me, that means embracing technology, like smartphones, but seeking to do so in a way that amplifies beauty and calmness rather than chaos and unease.

In the rest of this post, I want to stimulate your imagination by suggesting a few ways that anyone can modify their phones to enjoy a more peaceful lifestyle. I hope you’ll add your own ideas and apply the same process to every area where technology intersects with your life.

6 Ideas for a More Peaceful Smartphone Experience

Set a beautiful background picture for your wallpaper. Instead of the usual drab geometric designs, choose a beautiful piece of art that evokes an emotional response such as nostalgia, hopefulness, or longing. Allow the beauty to remind you that life can be rich with meaning. I’ve come to believe that aesthetics can have a profound effect on our choices by reminding us of other values or aspirations we have for our lives.

Quit using apps that involve scrolling or swiping as their primary activity. The most powerful feature of smartphones is the apps, and I recommend you pick useful apps without requiring you to get sucked in with lottery-like mechanisms. This means no apps that involve swiping or scrolling as a means of delivering random rewards (most social media, email, etc). Instead, choose apps that solve a real problem (maps, camera, notes, parking, payments, etc.) or enable you to enjoy without staring at the screen (podcasts, music, etc.)

Embrace limits on your total screen time per day. Some apps that you still enjoy may not meet the criteria above. Maybe there are a few blogs you read, YouTube accounts you watch, and sports apps you check to stay current— those can be fun and relaxing as long as you embrace limits. Most smartphones allow you to pre-commit to only using certain apps for an allotted time each day, a practice I highly recommend.

Create a minimalist home screen with only your favorite, most useful apps. Sometimes, just the appearance of a particular app makes you want to open it and see what’s new. That effect can be hugely distracting when multiplied by the number of times we pick up our phones throughout the day. A simple remedy is to keep only a few critical apps on your home screen and hide all the others in a folder or another screen. Small bits of friction like this can substantially slow down impulsive clicking.

Turn off the vast majority of notifications and alerts. Similar to my last suggestion, alerts and notifications are potent cues that are hard for our brains, so we check them the second we see or hear them. But why allow your smartphone the power to pull you out of the present moment at any time? Instead, I recommend having a very high bar for what kinds of notifications and from whom you are allowed to pass through and interrupt your day.