Ditto. Have you tried going greyscale in your phone? It’s an interesting setting that makes the device significantly less appealing to use. (Easy to turn off/on again as needed in the control center once your configure.)

In the mid-aughts, inspired by Tim Ferriss’, The Four Hour Workweek, I embraced the remote-only life of a digital nomad. This was before for iPhone, mind you, but I adopted an accessible-anywhere lifestyle and ran multiple businesses using the services that were available at that time VOIP for phones & fax, DocuSign, LogMeIn (now GoTo), DropBox and, later, Evernote (which now sucks), Trello, Asana, and Slack.

I prided myself on being completely reachable during extended trips to India and East Asia, productive from any random beach or cafe, efficient across time zones, for over a decade. I travelled so much, the State Dept. had to reissue a passport for me after I filled up the extension pack that had been added to my book.

Now older, my staff knows I’m not reachable when I travel unless there’s fire, flood, or blood.

I want to be offline as much as possible now. There is simply no way my brain can keep up with the constant barrage of notifications. For my own sanity, I have to reduce, limit, cut away, via negativa (to borrow from Taleb), to allow myself room to breathe in this new attention economy.