GoKawiilEverybody asks me why my phone is in grayscale. I tell them the story and show them my setup. At some point I got tired of repeating myself, so I wrote it down.
It starts with a failure. Once I overrode my own website blocker for 444 minutes. Not to check something important. Just to scroll. That day I accepted something I should have accepted much earlier: willpower cracks. Every time I relied on it, it eventually broke. So I stopped relying on self discipline and started building friction instead.
Maximum fun. The rest of this post is about making this boring.
Trying to get my focus back is nothing new to me. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: none of them ever had me. X on my phone is just a development news website. But staying away from those never solved anything, because my problem was never the apps. The traps are everywhere and they are intentional, built to be addictive, as The Attention Merchants describes well.
My problem is YouTube and Reddit, the two corners of the internet I can't cut ties with, because they are genuinely useful. On YouTube there are lots of incredibly beautiful and helpful videos: some about things I like and watch occasionally, some about my profession, and sometimes I show people old stupid videos I still laugh about to relate to the moment (this one is in Turkish, sorry). Reddit has genuinely good subreddits like r/LocalLLaMA and r/Python, and whenever I'm not satisfied with a Google result, I just add "reddit" to the end of the search. LinkedIn belongs in the same category: I lead a community, we organize events, and people without my contact info reach me there.
The things that drain me are the things I can't quit. So the plan was never to quit them. The plan was to make them boring.
Make it harder
The first thing I tried was making things harder, which is how you break a bad habit. I disabled the YouTube app on my Android phone and forced myself to use the browser. That alone didn't cut it, but YouTube's mobile browser experience is not great, so it already felt better than I expected.
Reddit got the rough treatment: I used the app for a while, then deleted it immediately. Too much noise, too much distraction. This was my first real lesson: no native applications for anything that resembles social media. The LinkedIn app got deleted too.
There are new devices like the Minimal Phone that claim to give your attention back to you. I haven't touched one yet, but I have been using Olauncher for more than a year and I'm happy with it. It is a distraction free, minimal launcher.
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