The Sundarban
Printed Jan 26, 2026, 5:00 PM EST
Raghav Sethi began his tech writing rush in 2022, contributing to his college’s originate-source community weblog. Later that year, he joined MakeUseOf, and since then has written widely about Apple, Android, and AI. His work ranges from hands-on experiments to idea items that hit upon the bigger image within the back of emerging tech trends.
Alongside his work at MUO, you can also win Raghav’s articles at XDA Builders, the place he mainly makes a speciality of Linux and the area of originate-source software.
Exterior of writing, Raghav enjoys working on coding tasks, playing the guitar, and residing life on the threshold by installing the latest beta software on his daily units.
My phone has slowly become extra distracting than I’d treasure it to be. No longer in an “addictive” way exactly, but it was starting to really feel too noisy. I wanted it to be cleaner and quieter, without constantly pulling my attention in varied directions.
So when I kept seeing of us swear by digital minimalism, I certain to provide it a shot. I already knew there are ways to transform your phone into a slow phone, and I figured this is at possibility of be another step in that path. I assumed it would assist catch issues beneath management, but I executed up walking away feeling treasure the overall idea was far less beneficial than it’s made out to be.
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I made my phone as dead as attainable
If it seems slow adequate, maybe I am going to cease opening it
The primary step to getting this so-called “distraction-free” setup was, obviously, changing my launcher. I was already the usage of Niagra Launcher, which is fairly minimal to initiate with, but I figured there was silent room to head much extra efficient. What I wanted was something without icons totally. After a bit of searching, I settled on Before Launcher.
As you can witness within the screenshots above, it replaces all the app icons to your individual home display with straight forward, dead textual instruct material. You catch a clock at the tip, a short list of apps, and a few basic stats underneath. That’s radiant much it.
It’s actually eerily similar to the launcher conventional on the Minimal Phone, so I was definitely getting someplace. I picked the apps I wanted easy access to and added them to the main display. However obviously, I uncared for all social media apps treasure Instagram.
Credit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
For certain, switching launchers alone was by no means going to be adequate for this experiment, so I took issues a step additional. I’ve heard of us talk perpetually about how enabling grayscale and turning your phone black and white makes it less appealing to make employ of, so that was the next factor I tried.
I assumed developing Digital Wellbeing would be a correct idea, so I created a few level of curiosity modes, objective to maintain interruptions beneath management. The goal here wasn’t to aggressively manage display time or treat this treasure an addiction intervention. I wanted the phone to really feel less distracting overall, not something I had to constantly combat against.
It’s not as correct of an idea as it sounds
This felt smarter in my head
Credit: Raghav Sethi/MakeUseOf
As soon as I had all the pieces status up, I gave it a fleshy week and tried to be fair with myself about how it felt. At the cease of it, I realized it didn’t really change much, at least not for me. I may well not immediately explain why, but after sitting with it for a bit, a pattern started to emerge.
Contemplate about the way you actually employ your phone. Enact you employ most of your time staring at your individual home display, or are you almost always interior apps? Clearly, it’s the latter. That’s what phones are constructed for. And that’s the place this complete idea started falling apart for me.
I can make my home display as dead I want, however the places — the apps themselves — don’t really change. I can’t apply a launcher or a novel obtain language to individual apps, and I definitely can’t management how they’re structured. Each app on my phone is actively designed to grab as much attention as attainable, and there’s best a lot I can achieve about that.
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Take Instagram as an example. I employ it for some community chats and DMs, which are radiant active daily. However one of the best way to catch to these messages is by opening the app. And there you pace, the primary factor you witness is never really your chats, but tales and posts instead.
As much as I disfavor that, it’s very clearly intentional. That’s how Meta wants the app to work, and I can’t achieve anything about it. I know apps treasure Beeper exist, but in my trip they have been semi-reliable at ultimate.
Even issues treasure the grayscale display started irritating me after a whereas. At that level, it stopped being about decreasing distractions and became into a energy of thoughts test. And as long as there is a toggle to flip it off, I know I’m eventually going to make employ of it. Some of us is at possibility of be able to stick with it, and that’s great. However for others, it objective turns into a hassle.
You have to make some compromises to make it work
Minimalism is never really cheap
I really wanted this setup to work, but it clearly wasn’t for me. Whereas trying for alternatives, I executed up browsing r/digitalminimalism, and one pattern kept coming up: of us weren’t fixing their phone usage with software tweaks alone.
