What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night.
Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed.
For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple lazy taps away. Now I at least have to walk to it if I want it, and that often "breaks the spell."
I finish work and chores hours earlier when my phone is charging in another room, without consciously doing anything else differently.
It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.
I ended up building a nice charging station right near the entrance. It has storage for keys, wallet, and other things to grab when heading out. It has an abundance of wired and wireless chargers for all devices.
Then I got a dumb (but nice) alarm clock for the bedroom.
Then I noticed that a common reason to pick up the phone is to check the calendar. I ended up hanging a monitor on the wall, displaying the family month/agenda calendars. It’s read only, but it prevents a lot of device checking.
Cannot recommend enough restructuring physical reality to not have device on your person at home. It also helps the kids to put theirs away and learn good habits.
You see, I've actually had some success with using Blocksite on my phone and blackholing things on my laptop by editing /etc/hosts. Of course if you have the access to put these filters in-place then you'll have the access to remove them, but the time it takes to fire up the blocker on my phone and disable it or to pop open a shell and type "mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak" is time enough for me to go "Am I actually accessing this because I care about some particular piece of content or am I just trying to plop myself into the dopameme stream?" It's not about 100% physically preventing myself from accessing these sites. It's about interrupting the flow. I used to have a problem where I'd be doomscrolling FB or TikTok in particular, realize that I haven't had any actual fun in about half an hour, close the app and exit the loop for a second, start looking for something else to do and then compulsively open the app again and start doomscrolling. Getting rid of the apps and having the web version default to being unavailable has made it so that I can still do the social part of social media with real people who send me content that I actually like and want, but I can't do the completely antisocial part of social media where robots send me content designed to piss me off and frighten me so that I interact with them and their masters get money.
I think there's one common element between our two approaches though: intentionality. Whether it's opening up a second app and disabling it, or walking into the other room to physically pick your phone up, there's an intervening step that allows us the space in which to go "Do I actually want this?"
I also keep it across the bedroom so I need to get out of bed to turn the alarm off.
Leaving my phone on the charger in the bedroom after 5pm completely removes the temptation. If somebody needs to reach me, they can call my wife or just leave a message for me to check in the morning. I've been doing this for several months and it's worked wonders for my attention span, my sleeping habits and my vision.
If you're using an iPhone, you can use Assistive Access to disable a lot of stuff, making it functionally simiilar to a flip phone:
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
There's probably an Android equivalent, but I can't speak to that.
And great insight about the calendar. That's the #1 reason why I keep my phone near me (thereby facilitating all the unwanted behaviors)
One of the most interesting things about a hardware based restriction is that it entirely avoids the game of turning on and off apps or deinstalling them. Even if you want to respond to a message in your DMs in Instagram, it will work, but the temptation to pull up the Reels or For you page just isn't there when it's all black and white and choppy.
Mind you we are super early stages but the idea feels promising and by my own testing I have really found it to be a much more pleasant phone experience.
I'll post some links here if people are interested.
Similarly (easier but less drastic) I’ve seen people turn their phone to grayscale mode to make the device less engaging and remind you that it’s a productivity device, not an entertainment device. On iOS you can do this through the Accessibility settings. (Settings > Display & Text Size > Color Filters > Color Filters on, Grayscale
A half hour before the alarm goes off, it slowly gets brighter which I find simulates the sun rising enough to be a more pleasant waking experience. Plus I set the alarm sound itself to bird chirps, starting with 1 or 2 birds and growing into a whole chorus (I'm usually up before then)
I hear the ancients had their own crude technology for this:
(Final 'graph especially.)
Addresses your first point.
For the second: communication.
It turns out digital collaborative calendars are pretty great for us in general, there is no chance in hell I could keep the analog one up to date, so it was definitely worth having a screen on the wall.
OneSec [1] is the only one that worked for me. It's quick enough that I'm not tempted to disable it, yet annoying enough that makes me think twice if I really want to open app X for the third time today.
Also it's just a polite nudge, rather than a full block, or condescending messages saying "you've hit your time limit for today" (that make you feel bad and make you want to immediately disable the thing in the first place).
Wish parental controls were designed with the same principles.
A half-measure for this would be to arrange your charging-setup so that you can't use and charge the phone at the same time. For example, USB cables long enough to reach the nightstand, but not long enough to comfortably hold the phone in front of your face.
Black and white kills the dopamine cycle and brings color back to your real life.
I would give a try to an e-ink based smartphone if there was a good one. The only reason I got a smartphone in the first place in 2020 was access to maps/taxi/banking apps which would work with any display. But given the grayscale experience I wonder if you get used to laggy e-ink videos as well.
Or you're talking about literal black-and-white, as in 2 colors no grey?