You will become more aware of your surroundings if you look for cool things to photograph. I recomand using an actual camera, the quality of it is irrelevant. Using your phone will be a distraction since you open it to take a photo, but see a notification from x and then you will at least think about how to respond, even if you don’t open it.
I’m jealous of three of my friends:
- A street photographer with a primary focus on London
- A worldwide landscape photographer from Nepal
- And travel photographer from Bangalore
They are all non-professionals, but their work is well-praised, and I won’t be surprised if you have seen them, too.
The idea of framing your view in pictures gives you the right amount of encouragement to walk a lot more. Recently, I walked about 15 km on a weekend, taking photos of the eerily empty weekends in San Francisco. https://www.instagram.com/p/CtpbIlJujAH/
Of course, my phone never makes a noise - no notifications.
It's like having a cigarette in your mouth, a lighter in your hand and not smoking - if you can do that then you have truly kicked your addiction.
I am sure Android has similar.
I've tried not spending my time on my phone for years. Guess what I'm doing right now.
- There are no social apps (Instagram, LinkedIn, etc) on my phone. I prune apps that I do not use, once a while and have set an arbitrary limit of less than 42 non-Apple apps on the phone. I will keep reducing that number and will negotiate my mind to less than 10.
- The first thing I did on any new installation is disable notification[1]. The only notification I have on the phone is the critical ones such as Health, Calendar. I have been doing this for more than a decade.
- I carry a phone but it does not even ring[2], except for some of my family and friends. I have left/forgotten and intentionally left the phone while walking around the neighborhood and had never missed it. I do have a watch on, at almost all the time and that also allowed me to de-tether the phone much more.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...