[nicbou]

I'm trying, but it's so hard!

I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.

Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.

How do you people handle it?

[ben_w]

I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.

My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.

I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).

Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).

YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.

* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.

[mghackerlady]

I started by just turning off notifications for anything that isn't needed for important people (eg: friends and family) to reach me. I got rid of most social media[0] a little while after that. Another thing I did when I still used a smartphone was remove all the apps from my home screen. At least on iOS, notification badges don't appear in their slide-out app tray thing. For quick access to essentials I used an app that provides a widget for hyperlink like launching of apps

[0]HN, Reddit, and Tumblr are the exceptions for me. I have notifications off and those platforms tend to invite more nuanced discussions and be less distracting over all

[dfxm12]

The first step is to understand why you can't disconnect. Ways to handle it will be different based on that.

One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.

[matthewaveryusa]

Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee

Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...

[Aldipower]

I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.

[mghackerlady]

One of these days I'm going to get an old thinkpad, install OpenBSD on it, and switch the majority of my computing to TUI programs. Lynx renders websites remarkably well and keeps me away from the seedy stripmall the internet of today is. Perhaps I'll start posting on Usenet, I hear there are at least a few people still there