The Pros and Cons of Using a ‘Dumbphone’.
As a product manager at a tech start-up, day to day tasks involve constant jittering between emails, design tools, keynotes and excel. Basically, life revolves around software and unfortunately - distraction. Recently I’ve been absorbing myself into books such as Nicholas Carrs ‘The Shallows’ , and articles such as this to try and get a better understanding of how mankind’s new way of living is effecting our brains. The long and short — we’re transforming into reactive, distracted monkeys, and I’m of the opinion we should all be determined to do something about it.
I’ve been a religious meditator for over 5 years now, but 20 minutes of concentrated practice a day is surely not enough to counterbalance the 8–10 hours spent sitting at a computer screen, absorbing data at a frenetic pace, all while trying to output something useful for my company. No, if we really wanted to safeguard against the way the internet and software is manipulating our oh-so plastic brains we are probably going to have to take a rather more drastic action.
Logging into eBay, I resisted the initial temptation to scour for some bargain designer summer shirts and instead purchased a Nokia 3310, equipped with all the bells and whistles you’d expect: Snake II, an SMS ‘inbox’, and the option for speed dial. Of course, the real advantage of this phone was the features it didn’t have, no internet connectivity meant no Facebook, web browser or WhatsApp.
Over the next 30 days I trialed a new way of living and I’ve attempted to summarise what I personally found to be the pros and cons of replacing my iPhone with a Nokia
Pro & Con — You have to learn to plan again
Seriously, it takes being without a smartphone to really get an appreciation for how much easier these devices have made your personal logistics and planning. Every Thursday is date night and usually checking the distance to the agreed location from my office in the morning — working out the time I’d have to leave — would be sufficient planning, knowing my phone will safely guide me to wherever I need to be.
