2025-10-24
With being on my phone too much, I’m going to give Olauncher a try. Olauncher is just a minimalist UI for your phone. The start up screen only has up to 8 apps that you choose to pick from and the rest of your apps are in list form to search or scroll from without any icons. That is it.
I tend to be a maximalist when dealing with customizations that I most often fall into rabbit holes all the way down. I really love having my daily bible verse widget or see my fake Github commit streak that I use with my Obsidian git plugin (I said the quiet part out loud lol) to my calendar widget to remind me everything. I even went into tedium to organize my Nova Launcher folders and layout to be “ergonomically” efficient so that my right thumb can access every favorite app at a quick swipe. However, this leads to a lot of ADHD app switching to perpetual doom scroll from the YouTube app, to web browser, to Instagram, Reddit and back to YouTube again.
I don’t feel like I am a hundred percent there for work when I really want to solve an interesting difficult problem I have been trying to debug. Or implement a new feature when I could have done it sooner or more efficiently. I feel that this distraction disrupts my dopamine feedback cycle that makes me shy away from tough programming moments. When I am at home, I would like to accomplish goals and learnings that could help me grow as a software engineer or continue to practice my hobbies (music and now this blog site) that really bring me joy. But the worst is when I am trying use the same escape at home while my wife and 1yr daughter are around. It’s disheartening to see my daughter become more interested in my phone and trying to snatch it to play with it when we could be playing together and interacting with each other… being present with each other.
The inspiration was ironically from this YouTube video (at least it wasn’t a short) that gave me some inspiration and motivation. I will have to think about more with implementing something like ScreenZen since I also don’t want to customize a lot and over commit myself. I am making this post more as a continual post to see how I like this set up so far and track if it helps before jumping in. From writing this post, I also set everything to gray scale and turned off stray notifications that are distracting. Over time, I will also tweak. Sigh, but I am already missing those widgets though.
2025-10-30
So far, the minimalist UI of Olauncher makes for a disengaging experience for most of my phone. It feels like when I open my phone for a legitimate need, I just go in do it and close the phone. I think maybe the icons and widgets that I have set up on Nova Launcher seem to keep me on the phone until I open to the next application. However, things like Reddit, Instagram and Youtube set in the feedback loop of doom scrolling and ultimately wasting time that I could of had. I will have to try to implement ScreenZen to see if giving myself a schedule or timer for apps would be helpful. I haven’t had a moment this week to try to implement that, but I will try it out soon. The grey-scale mode to remove color does not help me. It feels like an annoyance when I am trying to de-stimulate the screen. I am the type of person who would want to have as much color on my screen to see everything better. That is how I do it with my terminal configuration to try to see every text better.