I've been trying to organically spend less time on my iPhone. For a few weeks my average daily usage dropped from over 6 hours to around 4 hours a day, but it has been creeping up again.

However, I remembered the post by my friend, Elliot, who pointed out (among many great points), that a better metric to try and reduce was pickups. I can see that in the past few weeks my pickups have gone from around 80 a day to 120 a day, with the two most common apps used after pickup being X and Instagram.

While I don't plan on stopping using these apps completely, it does feel like they're my goto solutions for any moments of free time.

So the other day, after seeing constant ads on Instagram, I decided to try to use Blank Spaces. If you don't know what it is, it's essentially a set of widgets that you can turn your iPhone into a "dumbphone".

This now means on my Home Screen, I have seven apps I can launch from the Blank Spaces widget, and four from my Docks.

Widget:

• Calendar
• Photos
• Huckleberry (App for tracking baby sleep, nappy changes, etc.)
• Claude (Random questions that come to me)
• Spotify
• NetNewsWire (RSS reader)
• Micro.blog (In my mind, a slower and more human version of a social network)

Dock:

• WhatsApp
• Messages
• Safari
• Music (Purchased music, I'm slowly building my collection)

It's not as restricted as I've seen others, and I don't have any form of notes app. But that's because I want this to be realistic.

The only contender that I can think of as a future addition is Instagram. Admittedly, I can get lost in Explore and Reels, but it's also where most friends and family are.

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In case people are interested, the wallpaper is one I took myself while on a boat ride in Guilin, China. I beleive it was the Li River.