Like pretty much
everyone these days, Susan Butler stares at her smartphone too much. Unlike
most everyone, she took action, buying a $195 ring from a company called Ringly,
which promises to “let you put your phone away and your mind at ease.”
Ringly does this
by connecting its rings to a smartphone filter so that users can silence Gmail
or Facebook notifications while preserving crucial alerts, like text messages
from a babysitter, which cause the ring to light up or vibrate.
“Hopefully it
will keep some distance between my phone and my hand,” said Ms. Butler, 27, who
lives in Austin, Tex., and is a technology consultant for small businesses.
Given how quickly
cellphones have taken over our lives, it’s easy to forget that they are still a
relatively new technology. The first iPhone came out eight years ago, and today
a little more than half the American population has a smartphone.
Yet already
people spend close to three hours a day looking at a mobile screen — and that
excludes the time they spend actually talking on the phones.
In a recent
survey of smartphone use by Bank of America, about a third of respondents said
they were “constantly” checking their smartphones, and a little more than
two-thirds said that they went to bed with a smartphone by their side.
Many of these
distraction-reducing products fall into the growing “wearable technology”
niche. Smartwatches like the Apple Watch are designed to encourage more
glancing and less phone checking. Last month Google and Levi’s announced plans
for a line of high-tech clothes that will allow people to do things like turn
off a ringing phone by swiping their jacket cuff.
“If there is a
chance to enable the clothes that we already love to help us facilitate access
to the best and most necessary of this digital world while maintaining eye
contact with the person we’re eating dinner with, this is a real value,” said
Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of global product innovation.
An application
called Offtime limits customers’ access to apps they
overuse and logs their activity to produce charts on how much time they spend
on their phones. Another, called Moment, encourages people to share their phone use
with friends to compete in a game of who can look at their phone the least. And
a New York designer recently completed a crowdfunding campaign for the Light
Phone,
a credit-card-size phone that does nothing but make and receive phone calls and
“is designed to be used as little as possible.”
Perhaps most
radical is the NoPhone, a $12 piece of plastic that looks
like a smartphone but actually does nothing. Van Gould, an art director at a
New York advertising agency who moonlights as head of the nascent venture, and
his partners have sold close to 3,200 NoPhones, which they market as a security
blanket for people who want to curb their phone addiction but are afraid to
leave home without something to hold on to.
Like many of us,
when Ms. Butler comes out of a meeting or a doctor’s appointment, she finds
herself craving social media updates. She also had a nagging habit of opening a
website, closing it, then opening it right back up in the hope that something
new will appear. Addiction or not, it was enough for her to seek help from
Ringly.
Paul Atchley, a
psychology professor at the University of Kansas, is skeptical. Addiction is an
intensely personal matter, he said, and successful treatment is about having
the resolve to control our demons — not outsourcing them to message filters.
In technology, as
in life, a little willpower goes a long way.
