NPR: Overwhelmed by your smartphone? Try a boring phone

Transcript

Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. I am in a constant battle with my phone 'cause I don't want to live inside of a device, right? I want to live in the world, among the trees and the sky and the people - OK, only sometimes the people. But I, like so many of us, spend so many hours scrolling through stuff on my phone. And often, it starts like this. I pick up the phone to look at something for work. I see, oh, my friend texted. Oh, I have an email. And then I'm sucked into a black hole.

JOSE BRIONES: That's the allure of smartphones. It's essentially - you went to your smartphone. You opened it up to do something, and you end up doing something else.

SEGARRA: And it's hard to quit 'cause my phone plays so many roles in my life. It delivers messages. It's my alarm clock, my GPS, my camera. It's what I use to quickly get a ride to the other side of town. But we have learned there is a path forward here to something less hectic, less all-consuming and more human.

BRIONES: My name is Jose Briones, and the title of my book is "Low Tech Life: A Guide To Mindful Digital Minimalism."

SEGARRA: Jose is the guy to talk to about this. He had this problem himself right after college. He realized he was spending 12 to 13 hours a day tethered to screens, especially his phone. What he needed was for his phone to be less interesting. He needed a boring phone - yeah, a boring phone or a simple phone as opposed to a smartphone.

BRIONES: They look like a smartphone, but they don't have access to all of the apps that a regular, nonfiltered, noncustomized smartphone will have. So essentially, anything with an app store would be a smartphone to me.

SEGARRA: And anything without would be a simple phone or a transition device.

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