Keep the screen in your pocket

TL;DR: Don’t ditch the smartphone; reconfigure your interaction model with it. Use a constrained smartwatch (one that doesn’t pretend to be a smartphone on your wrist). Shift essential functionality to a gateway device; put the phone down and keep it out of sight.

The Thesis #

A constrained smartwatch is currently the best way to rebalance your relationship with your smartphone. Intentionally use technology and keep the attention-seeking smartphone out of sight. Thoughtfully designed software can enable you to use a smartwatch as a respectful gateway device, stay appropriately connected, achieve utility and reduce reflexive smartphone usage.

Why the constrained smartwatch #

Watches are the most unintrusive technology available today, originally they just passively displayed the time. Aesthetically they’re timeless, completely unremarkable and by default the screen is not in your eyeline. You have to move your wrist into an effective stress position to interact with them. They can run software, accept input (buttons, touch, mic) and return an output (screen, haptic, sound). You could create attention-seeking apps for them, but due to the limited screen, ergonomics, and physical discomfort of extended use, you’d get arm ache and no dopamine hit. The friction is a feature, not a bug.

But if the functionality is genuinely valuable — responding to an urgent message, looking at a schedule, pulling a note out of memory, asking AI a closed question — you’ll do it. Happily. Then you’ll drop your arm down and get on with your life. That is the sweet spot almost nobody is building for. Every other screen in your life is optimised to keep you on it. Infinite scroll, autoplay, pull-to-refresh, notification badges. Your watch is the opposite. It’s physically optimised to get you off it.

Why keep the smartphone #

Smartphones are amazing and extremely useful, and no other devices can replace the functionality that they bestow. There are dozens of critical apps that you use weekly: messaging (WhatsApp), banking, password managers that you cannot really live without unless you seek extreme digital minimalism and discomfort. They’re excellent at letting you consume media, information, and… social media. This is the challenge: it takes discipline to separate utility and consumption, but if you have a way to keep it out of your hand, consumption can become deliberate.

I’m a software engineer. I’m not a Luddite. I like my phone — for watching videos, reading articles, browsing maps, taking photos. The phone is great at those things.

What I don’t like is reaching for it to check the weather and surfacing 40 minutes later wondering what just happened. The phone isn’t the problem. The compulsion is the problem. We use our phones reflexively — and once it’s in your hand, you’ve already lost.

How we got here #

Passive feature phones and gadget era #

Before the emergence of proper smartphones we had limited connectivity and loads of gadgets. I think at one point in the late 90s/early 00s my Every Day Carry (EDC) included at various times a pager, walkman (tape/CD), noname MP3 player, dictaphone, compact camera (film and then digital), calculator/torch watches etc. It started with a Nokia nk402 (5110) and I worked my way through a 3310 (which came with an amazing MP3 player btw the HDR-1), a Razr and probably a few others. WAP appeared but was barely functional and none of this technology imposed on my life. I recall long conversations with girlfriends, friends and family and the functional exchange of SMSs. (MMSs weren’t bundled in the UK and were expensive.) All these gadgets were passive and not attention seeking.

A step change came when I bought a Sony Ericsson K800i (original firmware, my favourite phone of all time). It had email, basic web, a decent camera (for the time), expandable memory (M2), tethering and music/FM radio. This changed my EDC to a phone and an A-Z pocket map (navigation apps weren’t a thing yet). Armed with a laptop (via tethering) I definitely felt more connected with more frequent email, consuming news via basic web and even have a mental image of myself on a public bus browsing the internet on my laptop (why?!). Texting had overtaken calls and conversations.

Smartphone era (no gadgets) #

Then came the iPhone. The iPhone crept up on me slowly. I recall touch and non-touch smartphones of the era; they were cool and powerful but the UX sucked. Why didn’t Apple just stick a SIM card in the iPod? Well, they did, but also removed the stylus, introduced multitouch and revolutionised the UX. I let the 1st gen iPhone pass me by but bought the 2nd gen iPhone 3G. My EDC changed again… now it was just the iPhone. Smartphone apps replaced all the gadgets and life evolved to staring and stroking the slab. In the early years with basic apps and limited notifications I didn’t notice much of a change until I broke my iPhone.

Loss of control #

It was only when my smartphone died that I realised how much it had crept into my life, become an extension of me and use became a reflex. This is not a unique insight but it was the first time that I paused, and considered my smartphone relationship.

Most apps are free — which means you are the product. Most apps’ incentives are to maximise use/consumption. This is so they can profile you and collect data to better target ads and “improve” their products, which is recursive. Social networks evolved into social media. Short form content became the norm, allowing companies to better A/B test and improve their algorithm. This made tech companies fabulously wealthy but has had significant negative effects on us — every pause in life was replaced with a moment of consumption. The incentives are not aligned — the smartphone was serving the app companies. Always-on communication, through the messengers (WhatsApp, Facebook messenger etc.), raised everyone’s expectation of a near-instant response, and the social pressure to engage.

Screen time became a noun. Most people know they use their smartphones too much but doomscrolling short-form content is dopamine rewarding and we unconsciously fill every gap of the day with a hit. The notification itself takes two seconds. The phone keeps you for fifteen minutes.

The Pushback #

I had a decision. Replace the iPhone or adopt a dumbphone. Luckily I already had a feature phone available as I’m a climber and those early smartphones were too fragile to take up a mountain. Out came a proper dumbphone, my Nokia 105. About as simple as you can get: SMS and calls, nothing else, doesn’t even import vCard contacts, so I had to manually copy my contacts. I think I lasted 1 week. WhatsApp in my circle was a must, I used it professionally and with friends. No internet is extreme: I couldn’t even tether it to my laptop for emergency use. It may have had FM radio and basic mp3 player but I’m a Spotify guy so that was also tough. Initially I kept on picking up my phone in moments of pause but rapidly put it down when there was nothing to do, over the week this reflex faded. Adopting a dumbphone is extreme and not practical. Was there a compromise available?

I then doubled down and committed, so ironically I bought a smarter feature phone, a new Nokia 800 Tough. Surely KaiOS would save the day: it had WhatsApp (unfortunately no longer supported), tethering, email, contacts sync and an SD card slot. This time I loaded it up with some recently bought music. It worked and I tried really hard to persevere but it was buggy as hell. Email and contacts crashed daily and it was simply unworkable. It was better, and if it was workable I probably would have lasted longer but the tech wasn’t there yet. I returned it and bought an iPhone SE3.

I then looked into software app blockers and deduced that they’re either wrapping Apple’s native Content & Privacy Restrictions or a VPN loopback (I wasn’t aware of hardware app blockers like Brick or Bloom at the time). I already had a VPN and didn’t want to configure a random app to MITM all my communications, so I bypassed the wrappers and used the native platform controls. I also did the classic changes to make the phone less attractive: switch to greyscale/monochrome, reduced motion, optimised notifications, deleted apps, optimised the home screen etc. Initially this worked but over time I found the native controls too naive and coarse and found an increasing willingness to toggle them off.

Another compromise is the minimalist phone (Light Phone, Mudita Kompakt, Punkt, etc.). These are intentionally stripped-back Android phones with lo-fi screens, and some swap touch for buttons. A subset let you sideload third-party apps, with difficulty. This sounds like a great escape hatch: a lo-fi phone running your “essential” apps. But in practice it doesn’t work. They’re de-Googled, built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) without Google Play services, and the critical apps you need (banking, password managers) are exactly the ones whose vendors don’t support, or actively block, unsupported platforms. This was true in my case, so I haven’t explored them much further.

The most effective behaviour that worked for me was to buy a nice wireless charging dock, stick it by my front door, and not have a smartphone on my person at home. I would just suck up smartphone use when out and about. Could a behaviour or environmental change rather than willpower alone reduce phone usage?

The moment #

The moment came when I upgraded my Suunto Ambit to a Garmin Fenix 5 Sapphire and carelessly left “Smart Notifications” enabled. To be clear I never wanted notifications on my wrist and didn’t even realise that this feature existed but it changed my relationship with my phone forever.

You would think that WhatsApp and other notifications on your wrist would be toxic and worse but it’s the opposite. You receive a trash notification from some WhatsApp group you love to hate — your wrist vibrates, you skim the notification (sometimes just the contact/group name), and you can immediately ignore it in less than a second without changing context. You can triage it immediately without cost. It gets noisy, so you just set Do Not Disturb (DND) on the watch for a bit. All without reaching for your phone. The alternative: your phone vibrates in your pocket. You have no idea of the source or priority, so you take it out, unlock it, and open the app. It was indeed junk, but the phone is now in your hand, so you have a quick look across WhatsApp, maybe another notification source. Slip into social media and you’ve lost. You’ve switched context, lost 20 minutes, and the personal cost is huge for zero reward.

Most notifications don’t need a reply. They need a glance and a dismiss. When your phone buzzes in your pocket, you pull it out, unlock it, read it, and now you’re holding your phone with the screen on. You’re already context-switching. With the watch, you glance for less than a second, see it’s just your mates sharing photos in a group chat, and you’re back to what you were doing. No unlock, no phone in hand, no distraction spiral. The interaction is so short it doesn’t break your focus.

Could a smartwatch be a gateway device to keep the smartphone out of my hand?

Gadgets - they’re now called wearables #

I wanted to lean into the smartwatch and find the opportunity to leave my phone behind more. So I upgraded to the Garmin Fenix 7x. This gave me contactless payments (utility) and Spotify (screenless consumption). I could now regularly leave my phone behind when exercising and going out for short solo outings. It also had a torch (which is wildly useful) and the go-go gadget watch was back!

After discovering the enabler of a smartwatch I wanted to look into the vast world of gadgets and wearables and see whether, perversely, they could help me adopt digital minimalism through reduced smartphone usage. My assessment criteria were: are they remarkable, behaviourally attractive/triggering, and goal (gateway device) enabling?

Capabilities #

Wearables have three types of capability: input, output and compute. Inputs: camera, microphone, buttons, biometric, location and environmental data. Outputs: display, LED indicators, haptics, headphones and speakers. Compute: cloud, on-board, or via a companion (smartphone) app — giving you rules-based deterministic or AI-based probabilistic processing. Blending these capabilities gives you either a respectful and useful device or an attention-, anxiety- and privacy-disrespecting device. Often the capabilities have a sliding scale: displays run from MIP (memory-in-pixel)/e-ink (64 colours) — unremarkable, not attention seeking — to always-on OLED, AMOLED and heads-up displays (HUD), which are attention seeking and invasive. Cameras and microphones can be selective or always-on and either invasive or privacy respecting.

Glasses #

Glasses (Meta, Solos) come with various capabilities: open-ear headphones, camera, Heads Up Display (HUD), voice, and AI (normally offloaded to companion app). Can any of these help reduce smartphone usage? I believe AI and voice is a great enabler (see below) but I feel a HUD and camera would result in overstimulation and not have a positive effect. The privacy issues and hostility from others ensure that you’re always aware of them, and do not help reduce technology use. They’re remarkable and conversation inducing. AR glasses (Apple Vision, XREAL) are not considered as they’re not wearables.

Pendants and pins #

Pendants and pins (Humane, Plaud) can come with: mic, camera, haptics, voice and AI. In some ways they’re very similar to glasses. They’re mainly data-collection devices and lack outputs, which greatly reduces their capability to be a gateway device.

Fitness trackers and bands #

Screenless fitness bands (Whoop, Amazfit, Fitbit) are purely dedicated to biometric, location and environmental data collection and therefore do not help with the goal. They are, however, unremarkable and more discreet than the above.

Smartrings #

There are two types of smart ring: biometric data-collection sources (Oura, Ultrahuman) and functional devices (NEO, CNICK, Pebble Index 01). The data-collection rings are similar to the above, but the functional ones (mic, payments, NFC) are interesting. The latter could complement a dumbphone or perform some useful action that would keep your phone out of your hand.

Smartwatches #

There are two types of smartwatch: ones attempting to be a smartphone on your wrist (Apple Watch, WearOS, and arguably Pebble) and more purposeful ones with genuine smartwatch capability (Garmin). Smartwatches generally have all the capabilities apart from a camera.

A smartwatch that apes the smartphone — always-on, rich colour, feature-rich — is just a smaller attention machine on your wrist. Not what I’m after. Pebble is an interesting crossover: it’s attempting to be a smartphone on your wrist, but the e-ink display, buttons and battery physically hold it in the purposeful camp. The constraints are the feature.

I’m drawn towards low-colour, non-backlit MIP/e-ink watches from Garmin and Pebble that can be utilised in a respectful way. They’re unremarkable, discreet and can be non-attention seeking.

Headphones (AI and voice) #

LLMs have opened a huge capability to talk to our devices with natural language and respond in kind. Using voice alone is hugely aligned to my goals. However it does have problems. You cannot always wear headphones, closed-ear headphones are immersive/isolating, voice input/output is non-deterministic, not always efficient and talking to yourself is remarkable. I would prefer to supplement voice with a basic display and buttons to enable rapid interaction. Visual feedback is significantly faster than voice.

An interesting aside: it appears OpenAI are working on open-ear AI headphones (see rumours on “Dime” and “Sweet Pea”). I doubt they’d be goal aligned but are one to watch (privacy/connectivity issues acknowledged).

Requirements #

MUST be unremarkable, have some form of input and output and largely out of sight
SHOULD have basic display for instantaneous information consumption, buttons and haptics for discreet and silent operation
COULD have microphone for voice AI
WON’T have a rich display, camera.

There is only one wearable that fulfils these requirements.

Achieving a balance - the constrained smartwatch #

It’s a balance between benefiting from modern technology and keeping your smartphone out of your hand.

The quadrant #

quadrantChart
    x-axis Loses modern tech --> Keeps modern tech
    y-axis Phone stays in hand --> Phone out of hand
    quadrant-1 Modern and hands-free
    quadrant-2 Hands-free but cut off
    quadrant-3 Neither
    quadrant-4 Modern but in-hand
    Dumbphone: [0.12, 0.80]
    Feature phone: [0.30, 0.78]
    Minimalist phone: [0.42, 0.73]
    Native platform controls: [0.52, 0.22]
    Software app blockers: [0.58, 0.30]
    Hardware app blockers: [0.64, 0.38]
    Mainstream smartwatch: [0.78, 0.13]
    Phone dock by the door: [0.80, 0.55]
    Constrained smartwatch:::gateway: [0.80, 0.84]
    classDef gateway color: #b85a2a, radius: 8

App blockers demand willpower while the phone stays in your hand. Dumbphones actually work, but you lose WhatsApp, maps, banking, boarding passes — everything modern life requires. The quadrant that’s both modern and hands-free is basically empty.

I would personally recommend the Garmin Fenix 8 Solar, any older (or secondhand) Garmin MIP or a Pebble watch. A decent smartwatch (which specifically doesn’t attempt to be a smartphone on your wrist) enables you to keep your phone out of sight for the majority of the time, to be intentionally connected, and to perform quick actions, but notably keeps the phone out of your hand and significantly reduces screen time.

Garmin and Pebble are uniquely placed to enable this space. The Garmin Fenix 8 Solar is the ideal device. It has a low-colour display, an onboard mic, contactless payments and music. My current EDC is a Fenix 7x, Pixel 10 Pro, and I hope to unlock voice with a Core Devices Index 01 (smart ring with mic) when it ships. I have other AMOLED and mic Garmin watches for app development, but my technology choice is intentional and considered. I do not want a rich-colour, backlit, attention-seeking display on my wrist.

When your watch can handle messages, notes, and quick actions, reaching for your phone becomes a choice instead of a reflex. You pick it up when you want to — not because you have to. The phone goes back to being a consumption device, used deliberately for what it’s genuinely good at. Your watch handles the rest.

Disclosure: I build Untether — apps for Garmin watches so I can leave you can leave your phone out of sight.