I’m finally getting around to this Mary Townsend piece on ditching your smartphone. Her advice is difficult to gainsay, even if it’s quite countercultural:
It is perfectly possible to ditch the phone. While it’s still more practical, in one sense, to travel to work via and with your small computer, you do not have to, and there are manifold workarounds that you can and will learn, carefully, again. Get an alarm clock. The small notebooks you keep buying now have a use. Carry a pencil. Resolve to occasionally get lost. Get the number of the most reliable non-Uber taxi company where you are going, and save it in the dumb phone; the switchboard lady is going to love your call. The rest is planning ahead, printing things out, writing down the address for a friend, saying: I will meet you here at this time, and then walking out the door. Write down the thing you want to look up later; nothing trivial is worth breaking the chain of experience and memory, the slow build over hours. Make a plan which hours of the day you will look at the computer and which you will not. The first thing you should be looking for in the morning is the sky.