Seven days ago, I deleted almost all my apps.

My phone addiction has been a problem for a while. If I am being honest, it has been a problem for years. It elevated to an almost comical point when I bought the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again … and then failed to finish it as I got sucked back into another Twitter or Facebook vortex.

I have taken half measures over the years. Move the phone across the room at night. Delete the social media apps. Check on screentime usage. Each method of protecting myself from this diabolical device failed as my brain — apparently in cahoots with the phone — developed workarounds. Delete the Facebook app? You can just log into Facebook through your Chrome browser. Charge the phone across the room? That’s me sitting on the floor checking my phone. Each half measure failed fully.

This led to seven days ago, when I was lying in bed googling about buying a dumb phone. I imagined going back to my college days of flip phones, when you had to hit the number 2 three separate times to get the letter C to pop up. Ahh … the golden years. Then the solution hit me. I could just make my smartphone dumber.

So I went through each app on my phone and gauged the usefulness of the app versus the distraction of the app. Games and social media were the first to go, but the digging went deeper. Because of my former failures with accessing social media via Chrome, Chrome also had to go because I would be scared to know how many hours I have spent watching old clips of The West Wing on Facebook reels.

What about DoorDash? Gone. If I need food and cannot prepare the food or retrieve the food, I can at least open my laptop to order it. Amazon — gone. Venmo gone. I brutally slashed my hundreds of apps down to what I now consider the bare minimum. Left are my productivity apps, like Google Calendar and Tasks, authenticator apps that I need to access my work networks, my audio apps so I can listen to podcasts in the car, and my navigator apps so I don’t get lost or mired in construction traffic while ensconced in one of those podcasts.

Living in a grey zone are Outlook and Slack, which I use extensively for work but have plenty of real estate on my computer. I cannot tell if keeping them on my phone will raise or lower stress.

The morning after the great purge, I felt a sense of calm. I grabbed a book — an actual, physical, paper book — and read for 15 minutes before starting my morning routine. I went through my to do list without any breaks to stare vacantly at some non-story about the PGA. I felt reenergized. I felt joyful. I felt victorious.

Then the withdrawal started. Without realizing it, I kept picking up my phone and staring at it, sad that there was no compelling procrastination to be had. At one point, I found myself diving deep into the content on my Oura app, as I had not been able to delete this app lest I lose the functionality of the ring that told me how much this was stressing me out.

I have never been addicted to drugs or gambling or drinking — but I realize that the deprivation of dopamine from clicking and scrolling was hitting me hard.

Over the next few days, I alternated between gripping my dumbed-down phone as a lifeline and trying to exorcise it from my sight. There were moments of clarity as I felt the little Android demon’s hold releasing me, followed by the moment of irony when I conceived the idea to write this column and then picked up my phone to start drafting in Google Docs, only to realize that I had purged Google Docs.

So, seven days in, has this experiment worked? This weekend, while away with friends, I finished two books — Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and The Alice Network by Kate Quinn, both of which I highly recommend. I felt present for conversations, not pulled away to peer through the algorithmic kaleidoscope to the outside world. I watched a TV show (the season finale of The Gilded Age) without stopping to check on the name of an actor or to look up the other thing I thought I remembered her from or to peruse the latest headlines.

So I am cautiously optimistic.

However, the little rectangle still mocks me. After The Gilded Age, I did open the basic internet browser that came on my phone and found myself googling reviews of the episode. As if my own reactions weren’t enough, I needed them bolstered by experts. Even now, working at my three-monitor set-up with full access to the internet and beyond, I can’t help but feel drawn to the device charging ten feet away as if I am missing part of the world that I can only see through its eyes.

No solution is the proverbial silver bullet — certainly not one more app to rule them all. Time refuses to run backwards and technology continues its unrelenting takeover of humanity. But for me, dumbing down my phone is a small act of reclamation. I am reclaiming my time, my well-being, and the knowledge that I get to view the world through my own eyes rather than the Instagram-filtered “reality” of a 6.8” display.

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Destroying My “Smart” Phone