Try keeping a sketch pad for quick illustrations or perhaps a notebook for poems. The world is filled with inspiration! Not only will you be more present, but you'll be turning your seemingly humdrum life into a work of art!

Great suggestion. A notebook is primarily used for creating, a phone is primarily used for consuming and distracting ourselves.

I love that interpretation of jotting down information as creating a mindfulness work of art. What a thought! I used to do the cliche "note to self" with a voice recorder, that I've recently been desiring again. My cell phone is too slow to respond to my inspirations having to log in past the keycode, launch the app, dump mental information. Stepping through those hoops seems to decay my inspiration. You make me think about reverting back to old technology like the pen and paper. Come to think of it I get the sense that the mental decay from fishing for those materials in my pocket is less than futzing with a cell phone.

I just installed Microsoft OneNote to my Android phone and it added a quick launch app to my lockscreen much like how the camera can be launched while the phone is locked. I'll see how much mileage I get with this solution.

I actually carry a cheap USB wacom tablet around with my laptop for such purposes... I swear by it, it gives you almost the full freedom of paper without the restrictions of manual media (undo, scaling, duplication, restyling, etc.)

Have you ever tried a boogie board? https://www.myboogieboard.com/

Writing on it is very natural/paper feeling, there's no erasing or anything. With the more expensive models, it can sync the notes to a computer/cloud service.

wow, it's pretty affordable. How do you write multiple pages on it?

The way the screen works, it can only erase the whole screen in one go. I think with the cloud-connected ones, you can save the page off before erasing it and then view them later.

What a beautiful attitude :)

I did – I love it!!!! And a great suggestion.

I already have three pocket-sized notebooks filled up already with tons of art and ideas from my fountain pen!

(Love that pen. Now I write in a crude Spencerian script for extra fun points.)

I've often thought of going back to a dumb phone. The thing is, I want easy to use texting (only to reply with, I abhor texting but the rest of the world loves it), a phone, and this is the killer - good GPS. None of the dedicated GPS devices can hold a candle to what google maps has. I travel to new places too much not to have one.

I'm using a Nokia Asha 210 at the moment, its got a proper keyboard, GPRS, Wifi but no GPS.

Opera Mini is enough to browse most websites, and the lack of javascript support is a serious plus.

Half the features on the phone are dead though, the Nokia servers are gone.

I don't have a 4G contract. It's much better than a dumb phone because I can actually see the messages I'm replying to, and many other features also come in handy, but there's no constant distraction.

Mine simply died and I also skipped buying a new one, this was in last September. I didn't even have a cell phone for months :) Now I just use my dumbphone. I lasts a week on one charge.

I didn't miss the calls, or anything. Only the possibility to take pictures on the spot.

I always struggle with the photo thing.

It's fun to review old photos, so I enjoy taking lots of them. But anytime I put my camera between myself and whatever I'm photographing, it also feels like a removal of being in the present moment and just enjoying it for what it is.

This argument get brought up quite a lot, but rarely by someone sharing his own experience which is interesting.

I never really felt like this. Snapping a photo takes a few seconds and I can continue enjoying whatever I was doing, not that I'm not enjoying taking a photo :) To me it's just shrink-wrapping my mood.

I've actually noticed that I pay more attention to my surroundings when I want to take a photo - I think about what's actually engaging me, what I'm trying to record in a photo, notice the background environment, etc. Most of the time I end up not taking any photos because I know I won't capture what I want, but I like the increased mindfulness that thinking about it gives me.

I used to feel more as GP describes, but that's changed since I started carrying a DSLR every day - not that I don't still use my phone's camera, but I find there's a distinct and very palpable difference between taking quick snapshots as aides-memoires, and the much more mindful and absorbing state that, at least in my experience, is part and parcel of photography for its own sake.

I can do the former without removing myself from the moment, while I find the latter requires it - at least thus far, I haven't worked out a way to both remain present in an experience, and also engage in the kind of analytical thought and modeling that goes into producing photographs which are (or at least strive to be) worthy in their own right, whichever camera I happen to be using to do so.

I do miss the camera sometimes. :(

get a dedicated pocket cam

This is good advice - point-and-shoot cameras are really good these days! For $90 you can get one [1] that's the equal of any smartphone camera ever made, and the better of the vast majority - you might find a >16MP sensor on a smartphone, but you'll have a very hard time finding a smartphone with a 5x optical zoom capability. Spend a few hundred dollars more and you can get one [2] with an almost absurdly broad range of capabilities, including a 20-megapixel sensor and a 35x optical zoom capability that'll cover a broader range of use cases than any smartphone camera could ever hope to manage.

[1] http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/compact-di...

[2] http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/compact-di...

Polaroid also launched Snap:

http://www.polaroid.com/products/Z2300-instant-camera

I love the style and simplicity

I own this thing. From my experience it's pretty terrible. Inconsistent colors, horrible focus, open all the time if you throw it in your bag. Would not recommend.

Eh. Unless instant prints are a thing you really need, I'd tend to go with a discrete printer. You can get an inkjet capable of good quality on photo paper for pretty cheap these days, and there's got to be some tradeoffs in cramming an imaging system and a printer into a handheld form factor - for one thing, the sensor's only 10MP, and the prints are only three inches by two.

If I go with polaroid I go with polaroid, not a digified thingy: https://eu.impossible-project.com/collections/polaroid-600-c...

Though I have to agree it looks pretty cool.

Almost three bucks a pull? And I thought Velvia was an indulgence...

Do you not have a phone now? Does it affect your relationships with people at all?

I have family and friends in other cities and a girlfriend across town. Texts are just too convenient not to have when you need to coordinate. Just last week a friend passed through town looking for a new car and we met up for dinner - never would have happened without a phone. GF gets into a minor accident (not her fault, she would like to point out) and I can be over there in minutes thanks to a couple of texts. Father breaks his knee and I can follow how he's doing in real time, rather than finding out at the next family gathering.

I could do without the "smart" part of the phone. I really just need texting/calling (mainly texting). But I don't want a land line, and I'm pretty sure my relationships with friends and family would quickly deteriorate without my cell phone.

> I could do without the "smart" part of the phone. I really just need texting/calling (mainly texting). But I don't want a land line, and I'm pretty sure my relationships with friends and family would quickly deteriorate without my cell phone.

Why not just buy a "dumbphone"?

I have a cheap-as-costanza dumb phone with texting which has served me very well. I definitely need a phone! Can't whistle that loudly.

I'd love to stop using my phone so much, but I can't break the habit. Short of losing it, any tips for dealing with the stress when it flares up from not having the ability to fill those gaps with refreshes of Reddit, news sites or playing games?

Mindfulness, and studying the little details of your immediate surroundings. Meditation on-the-spot.

When I realized how dependent I became on the phone for my well-being I decided to go through a painful-ish withdrawal to get back my own sense of self. Definitely wasn't comfortable, which prompted me to continue the practice!

How long did that take you? Was was your low point?

First couple months I was the most impatient and impulsive. However, my whole life is an effort in staving off boredom and red traffic lights, so I try and practice mindful meditation every day to stay patient and "still" in my mind when there's no reason to be thinking furiously.

Low point was feeling impatient to check for updates when a loved one was dying and I was visiting at the hospital. Where in the world was my head? I was there to spend quality time with someone while they were still in the here-and-now! And I was anxious to check notifications from some random social website that'd be there tomorrow? WTF.

That's when I knew I had an Internet addiction, and that the phone enabled it.

I think it can help to have a hard intellectual problem you're working on. Your future startup idea or some talk you'll give or whatever. Then you can think about it when you have a gap.

you can set it to black and white (iphone under accessibility). i've heard this makes it less attractive to stare at. you can disable apps under restrictions on iphone - like safari. i've tried all of this and i inevitably just roll these changes back after a while.

Carry a book, or a fidget spinner.

How do you deal with 2FA?

I have a little widget similar to this hooked on my keychain for AWS: https://safenet.gemalto.com/multi-factor-authentication/auth...

And for other services? I need 2FA for couple dozen different logins. And not all of them support such hardware devices. Mobile phone is needed.

Google Authenticator works fine with an offline device, and SMS-based 2FA is insecure.

Right, but you still need a device. So you can just switch your smartphone into airplane mode and only turn the airplane mode when you want to make a phone call / use wifi.

You need a device, but you don't need a cellphone plan.

Not OP, but I suppose one could set up SMS based 2FA on a cell phone that is not a smart phone for most major services out there.

I see. Well, the way I understood it he got rid of mobile phone altogether. So no smartphone, no dumb phone (like old Nokia). That's why I wondered how do you deal with 2FA.