I still own a smartphone. That's rather the point.

I'm Ellen Vance. I spent eleven years in product design, four of them building the kind of engagement features this site now helps people opt out of. I know exactly how the notification you received this morning was tuned, because I have sat in the meeting where that tuning was decided.

In 2022 I hit the unglamorous version of burnout: fine on paper, unable to read a page of a book. I tried the extremes first. I deleted everything, bought a minimal phone, made announcements. It lasted nine days, and the collapse afterwards was worse than the original problem.

What worked instead

A small number of decisions, made once, on purpose. Which apps may interrupt me. Which rooms devices don't enter. What I do with the first hour of the day. That's the whole method, and it's the structure behind the workbook.

How I handle the research

Attention and screen-time research is genuinely mixed, and a lot of popular writing overstates it. When I cite a study I'll tell you what it measured and how confident it is reasonable to be. When something is my own experience or a reader's, it's labelled that way.

What I'm not

Not a clinician, not anti-technology, and not interested in shaming anyone for their screen-time report. If you want someone to tell you phones are evil, there is plenty of that elsewhere and it hasn't helped many people.

Reader stories keep me honest — you can send me yours, anonymously if you prefer.