We need less screens and more paper

Last few years I’ve been consulting for a company whose main product is a workshop planning tool. Some time ago we were starting to discuss a mobile app for participants that will make them more immersed in the workshop. I understand we need to capture the attention of users, and get a foot in the door to potential customers as well. Yet, nowadays I have a completely opposing view of this. Silence and tuck away your phones so you can’t see them. Put it in a radio frequency blocking bag as well, so we can’t even get those pesky notifications while we are working.

Screens everywhere are designed to distract us from the things we actually want to do. I don’t think anyone wants to look at a small screen for their whole waking day. Yet the content on those screens is engineered in a way that we are hooked and need to put in a lot of effort to detach.

I’m gonna run a quick thought experiment on how we could achieve both. We want to give some workshop information/tooling to participants, but don’t want them to pull their phones out. Pulling the phone out will lead to seeing a notification, clicking on it, and then “checking email / the company group chat”. And then we have phased out doom-scrolling, ask me how I know. Recently I am trying to get better with pulling myself out of this doom-scrolling. And it is bad on many levels for me because it breaks my flow and I need a lot of time to get back into what I was doing. If I even manage to break out of doom-scrolling. Same goes for people you are trying to teach something.

The obvious screen replacement that pops up here is what screens replaced in the first place. And these are paper handouts. We want to be eco friendly in our approach and avoid killing more trees than necessary. But what if the trees already died and reincarnated into recycled paper? Since you can recycle paper again (5-7 times), if discarded in the correct waste basket, we are doing almost zero damage to the environment. You can use a paper cutter if you have super confidential info on the handouts. And there is something about writing down stuff on paper that makes you remember them better. Typing them on the computer also helps, but in my case, I get much better results when I use pen and paper instead of the keyboard. The feeling of actual handwriting on actual paper is something surreal. I remember a period of not picking up an actual pen for years. I had to think real hard how to sign my name on some documents after those few years.

Countries that introduced tablets in schools are now banning their usage and going back to traditional ways of teaching. It took Finland 10 years to reverse course on that decision. I’m not saying that screens are bad. They at least weren’t as bad when I started, but there was much less to do back then, and you had to work hard to find information on the internet. Ads and banners existed, but the algorithms that would feed you useless junk to keep you engaged weren’t there yet, at least not in the amount we have today. Today we have to install tools and extensions to protect ourselves from all those intrusions. Ad-blockers, various browser plugins that make some apps less obtrusive and remove the “recommended for you” noise. These plugins don’t conform with the terms of service of a specific site. So when the specific site is also owned by the company creating the browser, they will do everything they can to block the plugin. Search for Youtube vs uBlockOrigin constant battle lead to browser manifest V3.

There is a benefit to having screens when trying to learn something new, but we should avoid pulling out our screen when we are amongst other people. This is gonna sound wild, but hide your phone like you hide your privates. If you pull out your phone in a group, you are making everyone uncomfortable and aware that you are not focused. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t have the same problem. What helps is having a greyscale filter on the phone. Without colours, the screen can’t pull me in so hard, I don’t get as much dopamine from looking at it, and my brain doesn’t pull me towards picking it up. Takes a while to get used to, and I have a toggle that switches it back if I want to look at colourful photos. Otherwise it’s more or less grey for me.

If you want to read more articles like this, drop your name and email below, I promise I will never send you spam.