What I Actually Use My Phones For

As you may have questioned from my previous post about not using social media, “what do you use your phone for, if not that?”

Actually, it’s what do I use my phones (plural, not singular) for, because I employ a method that spans across devices for specific use cases and clean digital and mental hygiene. Allow me to explain.

So my daily driver is my iPhone 14 Pro Max. It’s the exact specification I wanted, it’s uncompromisingly perfect for me in its size, performance, and longevity. This phone handles everything in my personal life, from holding all of my audiobooks, journal entries, private email and calendar, remote access to my homelab environment, media streaming frontends so I can watch server content on the go, it’s my pocket camera, my music player, my organizer where I store checklists to keep my life organized. This phone does not have two things, and by leaving these two things out, it’s the perfect modern day tool without being a distraction or a tether. This phone does not have any social media apps, nor does it have any work-related applications. I run focus modes so only a few select people and apps can actually notify or call my phone, based on what time of day and what activity I’m doing. When my phone goes off? My notifications are intentional on this phone and actually vetted as being critical enough to need my immediate attention. Other callers may hear my voicemail, but thanks to Live Voicemail, I can see their message and choose to intercept the call, if I want and if I’m available to. I don’t hear the phone ring, but I do see a voicemail icon flash in the corner, passively, as a “hey, there’s someone on the line, if you have a moment, check it out. If not? Totally cool”. I’ll always return calls when I have time. Same goes for text messages. Anyone not on the list? I still get their messages, but it pops as a passive notification rather than an active one. If you’re not on the list, it’s nothing personal. That’s mostly reserved for my romantic partner and immediate family. I will still very much appreciate your message and get back to it as soon as I can. I still see the icon in my notification tray, lock screen, and on a counter above the app, so those messages don’t get missed. I just don’t have anything taking my attention away from what I’m doing in the real world, which has allowed me to regain a deeper level of focus and concentration, so I can sit down and fully take in a book for a few hours without my attention span wandering.

Now, that leads me to my next phone. The work phone. Even though it’s not uncommon for people in my field to be provided with corporate work phones, I still feel it’s important to have your own separate work phone, one that you bought and own yourself. First, because not all corporations provide you with a phone. Some operate on a BYOD model, which can actually get interesting, since some BYOD models require your employer to install MDM or Mobile Device Management, on your device, to protect company data. This gives them administrative access to your phone. It allows your employer to remotely control your device, access the filesystem, install apps, uninstall apps, restrict what apps you are allowed to install, enforce policies that you cannot change, remotely wipe your device, or even lock you out of your device. Now, as a SysAdmin, I am in control of those MDM systems when they are employed. But I’m seldom the only person with access to said systems. If someone else is going to ever have that level of access to my personal phone? You bet that phone is going to be an isolated sandbox, separate from my actual personal phone. I am NOT raw-dogging my vacation pics and personal journal entries with corporate spreadsheets and documents, or risking my personal data being potentially erased, locked out, or subject to forensic audit, should there ever be a compliance situation that may demand me to turn over any assets connected to the corporation, in the line of an investigation. Thankfully something I’ve never been on the receiving end of, but something I have seen played out when I was responsible for assisting forensic analysts in my professional history, since I held the keys to the MDM, and have seen these data-ripping tools in action.

The work phone I use is a new-old stock Pixel 7 Pro that I bought for about 1/4 of full retail, thanks to Android depreciation. I always set up a dedicated profile for work, since Pixels allow for multiple sandboxed user profiles. This keeps things neatly compartmentalized, and is something that I could wipe cleanly without a full device factory reset, should I leave the organization and want to sterilize any corporate data, to ensure compliance with the corporate data retention policies, ensuring that I don’t have any data that I’m not supposed to still have access to after the end of my tenure. Another reason to have a separate work phone, even if I was provided one by the company? Some companies still require you to install some apps on your personal phone, for things like Authenticator, Outlook, Teams, etc.

The biggest reason for having a separate work phone though? That is how I maintain healthy boundaries and a stable work/life balance. When I’m at work and on duty, I have my Pixel in the work profile, I can get all of my Teams and Outlook notifications, and any other work-related pings. But when I’m off the clock, my work is complete, and I’m unwinding before the next day, or unwinding for the weekend? There’s always going to be some after-hours email, or Teams message, or something else, that may come in, which might spike your cortisol as soon as you hear it go off, and make you rush to check it. And more often than not, it’s something that you can’t really action until you’re back in the office anyway. But that ping pulled you away from what you were doing, shifted your mind back into work-mode, and chances are, you’re going to spend all night thinking about how to handle that task tomorrow, or all weekend thinking about how to handle something on Monday. I find I’m sharpest when I start my workday, and I’ll always find better solutions to after-hours requests at the start of my workday than I will trying to come up with something after having spent my fuel all day at work, and in a situation where I find myself running the midnight oil or the afterburners, trying to come up with a solution on 1/4 of the execution power that I would be capable of after a full night’s rest and a mental reset. This isn’t selfishness, this is literally prioritizing my headspace so I stay productive and avoid burnout, so I can continue to execute at a high level for the organization. Plus, my team knows that if something is a 911 emergency? They have my number, they can text or call me.

My third phone is an older Pixel 6 Pro that I used to use as a work phone, and bought off the used market for less than 1/4 of the new retail price. It has some screen burn-in, and the edges/back are pretty messy/dinged up. I have a sandboxed travel profile, with the minimum compliment of access that I need for travel. I don’t log into anything unnecessary, and I keep my personal data and logins on a remote jump server that I can disable access to if my travel phone ever gets lost/stolen, and use that same jump server to remotely lock down and wipe my Pixel. I always carry a laptop/tablet when I travel, as a secondary device, so if one gets lost, the other can disable access to the lost device. All travel devices are always protected with FDE. This is the type of phone I can just leave caseless sitting by the poolside while my wallet case stays locked in the hotel safe, and I don't even need to think about it when I go for a swim and leave it sitting under a towel. If the phone goes missing? I've already planned and prepared for that possibility, and I know there's no sensitive data that I would be afraid of leaking. Even the Google account tied to it is a burner profile.

Another layer to my travel phone, the Pixel 6 Pro, is I keep my jump server connection in a separate isolated profile from my vacation pics and travel apps, with a totally separate PIN, and I ONLY enter this profile when I'm in a secure location, such as the hotel room. Why? If I'm touring a public space and let's say someone snatches my phone right out of my hand, or shoulder-surfs my PIN? They're only going to get access to my vacation pics and some very low-risk apps that don't link back to any personal banking, notes, documents, or my main password manager.

And finally, the fourth device, which I’ve since retired, but figured would be worth mentioning to anyone thinking about soft-quitting social media, or limiting their interaction with it/detoxing from it. The fourth device was an old iPhone SE that I used to use as a work phone prior to the Pixel. I always keep my old phones around when I upgrade and just repurpose the old ones until I don’t have a use for them anymore. This device was my dedicated social media portal. It was the one place that had all my social media apps, centralized, so I could use social media intentionally. I had boundaries around it. I could only use this device at home, and only for a specific amount of time. I’d turn the device fully off when not in use, to increase the barrier to entry, so I needed to plan and consciously decide when I wanted to use social media and why. I did this for about 1-2 years before I finally decided to cut the cord completely.

And there you have it. My device rotation and what each phone does for me. Most people, influencers especially, see phones as “that thing in my pocket that brings me TikToks and Instagram”, and it’s led to a lot of anti-social-media influencers and social media detox influencers to heavily criticize smartphones for being “distraction machines”, which sparks these “30 days without my phone” and “I switched to a dumbphone” videos. But all of these influencers miss one very critical point, and that point is that, the smartphone was invented to be a tool, to make our lives easier. It’s not the smartphone manufacturers (or at least not all of them) that are evil here for making these devices. It’s the social media corporations and conglomerates who have twisted everyone’s perception and made social media feel like an integral and natural part of owning a smartphone. But once you strip away the marketing, the influencers, and the commonly accepted programming, you can reframe your relationship with technology and actually collect on the benefits your smartphone can bring you, without falling into the pitfalls that it can bring.

And honestly? Using a dedicated phone with boundaries, to me, feels like a cleaner way to fight social media addiction than going to a dumbphone. You’re not consciously depriving yourself. You’re just making it an intentional choice.

Anyway, I hope this blog post has inspired you and opened you up to a different, and very rarely discussed point of view. If you enjoyed it, please stay tuned for future blog posts.