Tag Archives: Steve Mays

Apple ‘Light’ Phone Experiment

My buddy Steve posted over on his site about ordering up one of the forthcoming Light Phone 2’s – basically a stripped down phone that does calls, messaging and that’s about it.

The prospect was appealing to me, and fatefully enough checking with my mobility provider tells me that the contract is up on my trusty iPhone SE at the end of this month. Fate? I dunno.

I’m painfully impulsive when it comes to things like this so as hard as it is, I’m going to exercise discipline and not pull the trigger immediately on a Light Phone. Instead, I’ll use Steve’s experience with it as research.

However, it occurred to me that one could practically render the iPhone a ‘Light Phone’ by dumping all the apps, or as much as the OS will allow, so as an experiment, I decided to do that. The surprise was that it was really hard to think about not using some apps, let alone deleting them – a telling indication for sure and perhaps a reason I won’t be able to go for the actual Light Phone in the long run, but we’ll see.

For the record, I’ve neutered my phone down to:

Lean Mean Home Screen
  • Activity App – Syncs with my Apple Watch;
  • App Store – must use, can’t get rid of it;
  • Calendar – even thinking about getting rid of this gave me the shakes. Trying to keep track of 6 family members without access to this would be a nightmare. Probably the reason right here that I’ll never go Light Phone;
  • Camera – can’t get rid of it;
  • Clock – can’t get rid of it;
  • Contacts – basically for phone/messaging purposes;
  • Facebook Messenger – still my main source of comms with many people;
  • Find iPhone – can’t get rid of it;
  • Health – can’t get rid of it, and I actually use it;
  • iMessage – can’t get rid of it, don’t want to;
  • Music – this was a tough one, but I use the phone to listen to music on the bike trainer and other places, so I kept it. I don’t use it in the car or at work though;
  • Notes – I use Notes for everything. All the time. I’ve got so much stuff in there;
  • Phone – can’t get rid of it, don’t want to;
  • Photos – can’t get rid of it;
  • Safari – can’t get rid of it;
  • Settings – can’t get rid of it;
  • Wallet – can’t get rid of it;
  • Watch – can’t get rid of it, well, if you want to use the watch;
  • Weather – I can get rid of this, but I need it in order to display weather on the watch, which I do use often.

I buried all the apps in a folder on the task bar at the bottom because they can mostly be accessed by a swipe right and/or search. For the most part, swiping right, Siri is pretty good about knowing what app I’m looking for and offers it up via witchcraft.

Notable exclusions/things that gave me pause about deleting:

  • Email – yup. No more email on the phone. This could prove problematic as lots of family business and updates are sent via email, but we’ll see;
  • ScannerPro – an app that I used to scan paper documents to GoogleDrive. Very good at what it does and useful for getting rid of paper clutter. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s great. I’m already thinking I will re-install this the next time I want it without hesitation;
  • Banking App – not sure how often I actually used this – guess we’re gonna find out;
  • Password Manager – all my passwords are still accessible on my desktops, but sometimes I had to look one up;
  • Chrome – I loathe the Safari mobile app. Also use Chrome on my desktops so I won’t get bookmark/history sync anymore;
  • Feedly – I can access this on desktop too, but on the phone it was my go-to time-killer. Got a few minutes? Find some articles on Feedly. Guess I’ll have to stare at a wall, or – gasp – talk to strangers now.

So that’s it, one screen. I’ll see what this gets me. Going to go two weeks from today and then review how things went and post up here.

The Empty Suitcases of the Past

The other day, my internet Pen Pal Steve shared a post with me from Derek Sivers about keeping a daily journal – something I have scattered experience with.

Here’s a portion of my response to Steve’s initial email:

I have, for many years, kept a conventional paper/pen journal. I have lapses where I haven’t entered anything for months, and other periods that are relatively prolific. My current stint is pretty much daily for a few months now. They are usually pretty boring, but I do go back and read old ones once in-awhile. They are scattered in 10-12 different journals as well as I would fill one and start or get a new one and start in that one. Some of them start in one year and then end maybe 5 years later with spans of the time in between either missing or in other journals. 

Thinking about these journals got me started thinking about my past in general. As I said above I don’t read these old entries too much and when I do I’m often struck by a sense of reading something by another person. They are often times embarrassing – “geez, what an idiot I was then” or “I was so freaking out about what eventually turned out to be nothing” – as well as all kinds of other cringe-worthy moments that can only occur when we read things written by a past self. It’s very hard to view them with anything other than a “hindsight is 20/20”-type of mentality. I realize I was – and possibly still am – far more likely to write about bad things, or when things weren’t going right – I made a mistake, was worried about something (invariably that was out of my control anyway), etc. Of course they are often packed full of complaints and general discontent. Very rarely did I crack a book and jot down, “Damn, everything is unicorns and rainbows today!” As such the journals often seem characterized by a general malaise. Perhaps something I should work on – or not. There’s no rules to these things – unless you want there to be. Mr. Sivers certainly applies more structure to his process than I ever have – or intend to.

We Carry Our Pasts Like Baggage

But those bags are empty – there’s nothing in them. I can’t go back and find any of those moments from the past anywhere. They’re gone. The I that was me then is gone too. As are the people I interacted with. They’re no longer the same people – even if I still see them everyday.

“We can only truly live in the present moment… so we should be sincere, in our conduct at the present moment.”

Gudo Wufu Nishijima

Obviously events of the past have led to where I am today and some of the effects of my actions – and the actions of others – may still be felt, but most likely they’ve dissipated, changed, or I don’t even remember correctly how or what happened. Statistically speaking, our memories are biased, flawed – in many cases flat out terrible – and in addition entirely unique to us as individuals. Everyone else remembers the same thing entirely differently from me.

I am not a product of my past and the person that I was during all that time no longer exists. That time, those moments, no longer exist – they are gone, no matter how real they seem to me in my mind or how often I choose to dredge them up and revisit them.

I am a product of my thoughts and actions in this moment – and only this moment. And then the moment ends and I am a product of the next one. This is a liberating realization. The only thing that is real and that I have even a modicum of control over is my conduct in this moment – therefore that is all I need to focus on.