by Maybe you failed at Stoptober, and feel bad about it. Movember may have been a secret, but nothing ever went wrong – especially in the upper lip department. December was probably a write-off from day one. And the less said about Dry January the better.
But with a new month comes a fresh opportunity to engage in a self-care exercise on the theme of a recently invented calendar. We have abstained from smoking, shaving our upper lips and drinking. Now, we’re getting off our phones. Or rather, we’re ditching our smartphones and trading them in for something more basic.
Welcome to “Flip-phone February”. The good news is that we are already six days in. The bad news is that you may be about to find basic day-to-day living much more difficult. But it will be worth it in the end.
The rules
Most important is the idea of Flip Phone February – an idea born in the US but gaining traction on both sides of the Atlantic – not going without a phone for a month. Too much of the navigation of the modern world depends not only on maintaining communication with people but on having access to the internet.
Instead, the challenge is to reduce your reliance on your smartphone by either significantly scaling back the apps and functions you have on your current phone, or by going one step further and trading in your smartphone for “dumbphone” – an increasingly fashionable throwback. style phone with only basic applications and a telephone keypad.
As the backlash against smartphone addiction has increased, there are now many such phones on the market. Many are flip phones. Most are much cheaper than modern smartphones. And everyone has a promise that when you take it out in the pub, everyone around the table will want to ask you about it. (If February is a flip phone like the other themed months, though, chances are you’ve already announced to everyone you know that you’re doing it, and posted about it online, and did it on at least 85 per cent of your personality.)
The practicalities
If you’re keeping your old phone and just removing the time-stealing apps, check the usage section of your Settings app to see exactly where your time is going. The most likely culprits are social media apps and games – they can go first.
There may be news apps that ping several times an hour, arguing that even the most trivial things are urgent breaking news, prompting you to scroll for 20 minutes through the front pages when, in fact, you could look in the morning and in the evening. . Except The Telegraph, which never throws a ping (no quibbling), delete those too. The same can be done for email. This may be hard to justify, especially if your job depends on it, but think about the need to mindlessly refresh your inbox, and respond to things within five minutes. Could you check your desk an hour instead?
Once your phone is stripped back to the bare essentials, or once your phone is able to trade in your base model, your normal scrolling should become easier. But then it’s time to work out how your day could be more impacted in more subtle ways: getting around using map apps, car park apps, digital train tickets, paying using a mobile wallet, and the like that’s it.
Most of these things may seem critical (and in fact, some things may be almost impossible without a specific app or QR code scanner), but often the question is sparked by something simple only – a little planning.
Tips and tricks
It’s trial and error, a Luddite life in 2024. But luckily there are online communities on sites like Reddit that act as support groups for anyone who gets involved. People could then share their progress, or ask how others have tackled certain issues. There’s no judgment, which seems lucky, and it’s flexible: people often have to re-download a certain app, but then set a 15-minute usage limit per day to ensure that the habit is not accidentally re-established. .
Take a notebook around, pre-plan ways, let people know (especially family and some colleagues, to convert the flip phone to P45 February) save that you are going semi-offline for a while… The tips are obvious basic but worth following. No one wants a missing person file opened because they don’t post an Instagram reel every morning.
Otherwise, choose your fighter. Different “dumbphones” offer different amounts of dumbness, so for people who need Google Maps, say, or Spotify, or Uber, there are phones that will offer that and not much else. Some have WhatsApp. And for those who want to go full 1997, there are tons of types that will do nothing but make calls, write texts and just run out of battery in the 22nd century.
The benefits
Brits are said to scroll on their smartphones for more than the length of the Eiffel Tower every month: that’s 519 inches a day, or almost three miles a year. Studies have shown that many people spend more than five hours on their phones every day, which equates to whole months of staring into that little screen every year.
This obviously has a negative impact on the time available for other things, and at the same time affects the quality of sleep and attention span. Not so good injuries include eye strain, “text claw” (hands and fingers bent into shape by too much texting), headphones, dry eyes and “cell phone elbow”, where users feel tingling or numbness in their fingers result in too much. a lot of time on the phone.
It’s no surprise that people switch to Flip Phones in February and black phones typically report having free times, more concentration, improved energy levels and (presumably) less sore necks. They might as well be fired from their jobs, but they’ll find out in March.
