‘It made my day more meaningful’: the Japanese gen Zers attempting a two-hour limit on smartphone use

I've found it helps to just use tools that massively increase friction, and make my phone less enjoyable. I'm not aiming for a specific target, just adjusting how rewarding or punishing it is in order to slowly shape my behaviour towards other things

Delays when I open something or keep using it, having to do math to keep using an app (which is through an F-Droid app called plug brain!) Blocks when I use things too much or open them too many times. The blocks can be circumvented by going to the block settings and waiting through a delay. Turning the saturation way down on my display. Moving all the mindless and scrolling apps I still use like lemmy and YouTube to the far corner of a folder in a far corner of my home screen

I'm hoping to set up ADB at some point so I can use tasker to manually turn the saturation back up on certain apps that aren't meaningless to me like my mp3 player or reading apps, so it feels extra bad to use other stuff and I can't fully adjust to the desaturation.

And I've been working on adding friction and removing rewardingness from youtube on my laptop which I use as my TV media center, and making decent progress there too, and I'm looking at getting some single purpose devices (mp3 player, eReader, setting up my old pokewalker and jailbreaking my 3ds) that give me exciting ways to interact with meaningful stuff outside of my phone and tv! ☺️