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Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

> you'll work out how to waste your time without your phone and you'll be back to square one.

I had a dumb phone for a year or so until maybe half a year ago. The ways I found to waste my time without smartphone were refreshingly different. Most importantly, thinking and wandering in my own mind without the urgent need to check every new thought from the internet. Long story short, there is now nokia 8110 with 4G and wifi available, I am likely going to get one of those soon and turn my smartphone off until I really need it.

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> nokia 8110

Bought one yesterday, I have to say that KaiOS is still veeeery immature, so far very far behind series 40/60 nokias. If you can find a Nokia 208 or 515 which are the last they made with 3G+ you might be better off.

What about audiobooks, discord/slack for team communication, or sometimes reading on public transport. You can easily block/mute notifications and all that. Don't use apps like Instagram (never used but some of my friends do) or other addictive apps and you'll be fine. To be honest smartphones are you the best way to push some (25 minutes) to practice skills when you have time window (apps like brilliant, Reedy)

Phone game apps are the most addictive but if you never download them you won't get into it. Games have 4 caracteristics that makes them addictive: winnable, it has goals, novel challenge that keep you in state of flow, feedback. These things could also be used in reading books and that becomes addictive in a good way.

Tl;Dr phone apps are the best thing to aquaire skills in the future. If you block or hide notification and not download addictive apps you will be fine.

If you use discord or slack for team communication your team communication features nothing important (ie you might as well not have it) or you work at a company that doesn't do communication security well.

Or you work at a company with no significant secrets that could potentially be shared through chatting. Priorities; why spend time and effort on some on-site solution when there's really nothing to gain security wise unless you have secrets? You won't be sharing passwords through Slack or Discord in any case, that's for a password manager, so you're really left with trade secrets, and why would there be trade secrets in a Slack channel for a web development company?

> Or you work at a company with no significant secrets that could potentially be shared through chatting.

In that case, why not communicate via Twitter or the Blockchain (tm)? Do you post pictures of yourself naked on Instagram as well?

Every person and every company has significant secrets.

That's against the instagram rules. Fetlife is where we generally post those.

The latter case is very usual.

> What about audiobooks, discord/slack for team communication, or sometimes reading on public transport. You can easily block/mute notifications and all that.

I can also easily take my smartphone with me when I think there is a real need. The 4g dumbphone can share the internet to my smartphone.

So it's a bar phone with a hotspot? I was hoping for something like that. I have a tablet with wifi only but I'd like to be able to listen to Spotify or audio books, use maps, etc when I'm driving. But then again, I also like to walk the dog and listen to books/music so I'd have to carry 2 phones unless it supports all Android apps.

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