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Tell HN: Keep Your Phone on a Leash

54 points by softwaredoug ↗ HN
Simple life hack if you want to avoid distraction: keep your phone plugged in and treat it as an old analog wired phone. Force yourself to walk to it to check whatever you need to lookup. If you listen to podcasts with it, use wireless headphones and walk around while listening. Unplug / carry with you as needed when you leave the house or need to take a private call.

14 comments

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theandrewbailey
Unless I'm not at my house, I keep my phone downstairs when I go to bed. The only electric/electronic device in my bedroom is an alarm clock. It's impossible to doomscroll at midnight with it.
heap_perms
That's such a good idea. Just today I have not taken my phone to my bedroom and instead left it downstairs. Best sleep I've had in months.
mcv
New gadget idea: an alarm clock that lets you doomscroll at midnight.
MisterSandman
Doesn't work for a really specific edge case: when you leave in a tiny university dorm room and have a 10ft cable. My phone can touch every inch of every wall in my room while plugged in.
hahnchen
Throw it under your or your roommate’s bed
speg
I have the best success when I leave it on the coat rack as soon as I get in.
jti107
i read a book called dopamine nation and it was eye opening on how modern consumer products are designed to hijack your natural reward system. one of the products mentioned was ksafe which is a box with a timed lock.

first time i used it with my phone, I locked it from 8 PM - 7 AM.

it was eye opening how anxious and uncomfortable i felt not having my phone to browse whenever i felt bored or as i going to sleep.

jakabia
Hmm, but it's possible that as you can't reach your phone, eventually you'll develop into using your computer for browsing, isn't it?

At least, for me, it's a bigger problem than my phone.

fool1987
At least a computer is a lot higher effort to use. Much harder to start browsing due to a compulsion when you weren't already using it. I agree it's just as easy to slip into doomscrolling on a computer browser but only if you are already at the computer (for me, at least)
robswc
I actually really like this small “obvious” tips because they’re so simple but so powerful. I think I’ll have to try this, thanks for sharing!
solarkraft
It's super obvious, but it turns out that your phone not being accessible all the time actually removes a distraction. It's hard to not laugh about how simple this is, but yeah, it helps.
chunk_waffle
> Force yourself to walk to it to check whatever you need to lookup.

I make an effort to not keep my phone at my side at all times. It's usually fine unless I need to interact with some sevice.

With the growing number of websites requiring MFA - specifically via SMS for which I can't use Yubikey (grrr), this becomes pretty frequent.

Sometimes I want to just grab my laptop and check some account from the couch and then have to go hunt down my phone it's infuriating.

joshxyz
I mean my iphone 6 already got shit battery so i kinda have this feature of it being charged the whole day, haha