Show HN: Can you go an hour without touching your phone?
phonefreehour.comAccording to a 2022 survey [1], the average US adult picks up their phone 352 times per day, or approximately once every 2m43s while they're awake. Inspired by Calm's DoNothingFor2Minutes.com which launched on HN 13 years ago [2], I made this simple webapp to see if my friends and I could go an hour without touching our phones. It is surprisingly difficult. If you're reading HN on your phone, definitely give it a shot.
On browsers that support it (iOS 16.4+, most versions of Android Chrome), it uses the Screen Wake Lock API [3] to keep the page open, and falls back to nosleep.js [4] otherwise. From testing on my iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 16.6, battery life only went down 3 or 4 percentage points after an hour with the wake lock.
Made this as a web app as a quick demo to be compatible across all mobile devices. As an app, we can probably save more on battery + not have the screen on. One caveat is that on iOS this will actually increase your Screen Time (although hopefully reduce your other category usage). I currently only track time on page through Google Analytics 4. No other calls are made to a server, although if we actually wanted to verify that you kept the page open vs. javascript/inspector-system clock-fu, we could add a verified mode that pings the server every X minutes. As a PWA, possibly due to an iOS/Mobile Safari quirk, neither wake lock nor nosleep.js appear to work .
[1] https://www.asurion.com/connect/news/tech-usage/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2124106 [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake... [4] https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js
I put my phone on permanent focus mode and specifically turn off even notifications from Messages, and I've found this to be super useful for keeping my focus. I see everyone else glancing at notifications all the time.
But even without notifications, I still pick up my phone on my own volition whenever I'm working on something slightly difficult. It's almost a reflex at this point. Something about wanting a little dopamine or even just something to touch and swipe around, which could provide some dopamine on its own.
This website is super useful because I don't even want to touch my phone because I don't want to end the timer. I love it!
In short, yes. Mainly because I keep it out of easy reach most of the time. I can still get to it, but I have to make a bit of effort to do that. Then, of course, there are those few hours that I sleep each night ... :-)
Interesting site. Not sure how effective it is/can be, but great work pulling it together. And, no, I didn't give it a go -- I can go long periods without touching my phone. Sometimes I forget I have one!
Yeah I can do it pretty easily and it's a frequent source of complaints from friends and family. I don't advise any married man to do this challenge more than once.
Edit: great product though, very well made kudos to you
Thank you, and wow, what's your secret? My partner and I have been competing, and thus far, she's been quite a bit better at not touching her phone.
I charge it in another room. out of sight but in earshot is the magic combo
The usual way I can to do it is by being busy with something else and keeping the phone in a different room (not in arm's reach).
I have found that an Apple Watch keeps me from touching my phone much of the time. Things like verifying an OTP or determining whether or not a notification is important are just a glance at my watch.
Oh interesting! I have a smart watch (albeit a Garmin instead of an Apple Watch) and purposely choose not to send notifications there because I'd look at it all the time. Do you find yourself glancing down at your watch even when you aren't getting notifications? Or do you have pretty tuned notification settings such that if you do receive one, it's likely important?
I've started leaving my phone in a different room, using it as a continuity camera, or literally tossing it on my chair or bed before sitting down to work, but inevitably I'll need it for 2FA via Google Authenticator— maybe it's time to move 2FA to another device, and once it's on my desk, it often gets picked up out of habit.
I think this misses the point of "not touching one's phone" entirely...