That's what she said.

I gotta start that over.

Like I'm sure many of you, I've come to rely on my smartphone for so much.

It's my GPS, my music player, messaging device, camera, and I hear that it can even make phone calls.

But this all comes at a cost, because for all of the amazing pros that my smartphone gives me, there's one massive con.

It's making me miserable.

It's the first thing I grab in the morning, and the last thing that I look at before I go to bed.

It fills so many moments of my day, from when I brew my coffee, to when I'm in the bathroom, to when I'm bored during a meeting.

These moments often add up to over two or three hours every day.

And I've done just about everything I can to intentionally bring my phone into my life.

I've deleted tempting apps, I've quit social media, I've created more distance between myself and my phone, but I always found myself crawling back to old habits.

So I decided to take things one step further and swap my smartphone for a flip phone for 30 days.

I really want to see if dumbing down my technology makes me any happier, and honestly just see if I can get by without it.

Before I get into this experiment, I want to talk about my course, Simple Habits, for just 30 seconds.

If you're tired of failing to build healthy habits, struggle to stay motivated, and you keep procrastinating on your goals, I truly believe that this course will help you meet your potential.

It sets you up with a plan of action, provides habit tactics that work, and gives you tools to create accountability.

You can enroll today at slowgrowth.com slash simple habits, or use the link in the description below.

And now back to my flip phone experiment.

You know, one of the highlights of my day so far was waking up in the morning and not grabbing my phone and browsing idly through the first half hour of my day.

That has become a habit as of late, and waking up this morning and not having that option forced me to just start my day, to make my cup of coffee, to start checking emails and get to work.

And that to me felt a lot better than checking the news to see what awful thing happened.

While the first few hours of this experiment started off great, it didn't take long for me to start to feel the repercussions of downgrading to a flip phone.

Now this phone has two useful tools on it.

Calling works like a charm, and texting, absolute nightmare.

It takes so long to text on a flip phone.

Sending an individual text message takes like 15 minutes.

I find myself being very short with people.

People probably think that I'm being really rude, when in fact, it just takes so long to write a text.

And so I'd rather just say, K, than say, okay, sounds great, which would take me 5 to 10 minutes to write.

I have a text message group right now with my family.

My family is very big.

I have six brothers and sisters.

My parents are on there.

We've got significant others on there.

Natalie's on there.

There's a lot of people.

It's about 10 to 15 people on this text message thread.

And my phone does not know how to bulk them together.

And so I have 10 different threads.

It's literally impossible for me to keep up with every single conversation.

I'm trying to push more and more people away from phone for communication.

So if it's something that's like a really big question and I get a text message about it, I might text somebody back like, hey, I'm gonna email you.

So that's one solve.

But on a positive note, I can now do this.

I've had just about enough of your attitude.

I said $4 million, okay?

That's right, a large pepperoni pizza with fries.

Oh, sorry.

So to give you a little bit of context for when I started this challenge, it was in the middle of the 2020 election.

And so the world was a little bit crazy.

And I got a little bit crazy with it.

Like so many people, I just got absorbed into the media, the election, the news.

I was refreshing news sites.

I was listening to political podcasts every morning.

And it consumed me in a really unhealthy way.

I noticed that my mental health started to deteriorate because of it.

I kept checking these news sites.

I kept dooms scrolling, looking for that next bit of bad news.

I don't know when it happened.

It was a slow trickle.

But I realized that it was causing me a lot of distress.

And so that was the biggest motivator for me to say, you know what?

I need to put some distance between myself and my phone.

All right, so I'm about a week into this experiment.

And I can already tell that one of the biggest benefits is that I am spending way less time on screens and really the moments in between.

The moments when I'm making a cup of coffee and I'm waiting for the coffee to brew.

Or when I wake up in the morning and I'm brushing my teeth, going to the bathroom.

I'm not on my phone in every single waking minute of my day, which is amazing.

Of course, there have been moments when I will replace my phone for my laptop.

But I found that I really don't do that that often.

Definitely not nearly as much as I was using my phone.

So I find more moments of stillness throughout my day where I can simply just be patient.

I do feel, as my friend Anthony Ungaro would say, that flinch.

The flinch to want to grab my phone.

But since I don't have it, since it shut off and it's locked away, it's no longer a problem.

This has really been one of the most effective ways in controlling the usage of my phone and my screen time.

But it does obviously come at a cost.

There have been some challenges.

Hello.

Hi, I'm looking to recycle some hard drives.

I was wondering, can I simply just come by and drop them off?

Yeah, you don't need an appointment or anything and it's all free.

Okay, awesome.

Great.

Thank you.

I'm heading out right now to recycle some old hard drives.

I've got about 40, 50 plus hard drives I need to recycle.

And so I need to go somewhere I've never been before.

I'm going to try to use my Google Maps on this phone.

But I'm not sure if it's going to work, if it's going to crash.

So as a backup, I'm going to print off some directions.

This is old school.

This is what I used to do back in high school, when there was just MapQuest and you had no GPS on your phone.

So I'm not looking forward to it, to be honest.

All righty, so let us see.

I got to put in my address here.

I have serious...

I accidentally closed out of it.

Now I got to do it again.

All right, let's see if this works.

Directions, your location.

Could not determine your precise location.

After 15 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to get Google Maps to work on my phone, I gave up and went with the printed directions instead.

Oh, there it is.

All righty, so I did manage to find the recycling center.

It actually wasn't too difficult, but I did have to pay a lot more attention to the road signs where I was going, which is probably a good thing.

I should probably pay attention while I'm driving.

Doing this one time, not a big deal.

I can print out, you know, maps.

But if I had to do this like five times a week, there's absolutely no way I could do it.

So this is becoming a problem.

I don't think having a flip phone full time, at least with my life, would work out.

Works for my dad, might not work for me.

And there were some other areas where I started to miss my smartphone.

Some small things like writing down notes, creating grocery lists, printing off my flight itinerary for our trip to Australia.

I have to print out my travel itinerary, my flight.

I have to print out my visas that I have and the travel exemption that I've got to travel to Australia during COVID.

So that's what I'm doing now.

Overall, with the pandemic, I spent most of my time at home.

So it wasn't a huge problem, but this would have been much more painful during more normal circumstances.

And there were some unexpected things that I missed about my smartphone, like capturing photos and videos.

When I look back over the past few years, almost every single photo and video that I have was taken with a phone.

These are now a collection of memories.

And so if I were to stick with an experiment like this for longer than a year, I would worry that I wouldn't be able to capture as many of those memories as I would like.

If you were wondering, yes, this flip phone does have a camera.

It takes videos and photos.

But as you can see, the quality is not very good.

But as my time with my flip phone grew, I still couldn't shake this idea that the costs of having a smartphone might outweigh the benefits.

So this whole experience is really getting me to think about what we trade for convenience.

You know, I think about the conveniences, the luxuries that we now have, being able to get anywhere we want, hop in the car, plug in an address in our GPS.

We don't even need to think about it.

We take that for granted every day.

Same thing with messaging, phone, taking notes on our phone.

All of these tools we take for granted because we have them.

And for many of us, we've always had them.

And removing them is a pain in the ass.

But it's kind of crazy to think that we trade so many times our happiness for convenience.

And even in this experience, it's very challenging.

And I couldn't imagine not going back to a smartphone because of the convenience.

Because I could hop into my car, plug in an address on my phone, and I don't even have to think about it.

And there's times that by a hundred with all these tools that I use every single day.

And so it's crazy, though, that it comes at the cost of our happiness.

I don't know what I'm going to do, you know, at the end of this 30 days.

Like, I know that the smartphone as I currently use it, it's not working.

But how am I going to be able to take advantage of the tools without those tools taking advantage of me?

All righty, so the time has come.

I have officially finished up my 30 days with a flip phone and I learned a lot.

Really, this experience has taught me, just like so many of the other digital minimalism experiments I've practiced with in the past, just how dependent I become on my phone and how easy it is for me to fill up all those in-between moments of my day with a glowing screen.

I do complete this 30 day experiment feeling more focused than I have in a while, feeling refreshed.

And I feel like it's taught me a lot about myself.

Now, this is probably the most extreme digital minimalism experiment that I've ever done.

I've quit social media before.

I've experimented with different rules.

This was really an opportunity for me to completely detach from the technology that I had become so accustomed to.

Now, locking up my smartphone for 30 days certainly didn't solve all of my problems.

There were other ways that I found myself getting distracted.

As I started to transition out of using a flip phone back to my smartphone, I want to do it in a much more intentional way.

Of course, I'm only human and I will likely slip up and, you know, go back down these rabbit holes where I wake up first thing in the morning and check my phone.

But for the most part, I want to really set up guardrails and rules to make sure that I'm getting the most out of my phone without my phone using me, without me feeling like I'm serving my phone.

And so the experiments have really just begun, but I'm definitely looking forward to entering 2021.

It's hard living like it's 1990.

The new year is upon us and it's the perfect time to invest in yourself.

If you want to learn more about my course called Simple Habits, go to slowgrowth.com slash Simple Habits.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you next year.