I didn’t think I had a phone problem.

I run multiple businesses. I wake up early. I work out. I read. I’m productive. I’m disciplined. I’m a fairly busy guy. Time is money and I don’t waste time.

Then my phone told me the truth.

Four to five hours a day.
Every day.

Not because I needed to be on my phone … because I couldn’t stop checking it.

A couple of years ago, I switched from a Google Pixel to an iPhone. It was mostly a minor change. Better camera. Smoother interface. I was blue in text messages with my iPhone friends instead of green. Nothing life-changing.

But one feature got my attention.

Screen Time.

Within days, I realized I was spending four to five hours a day on my phone. On average. Every day. Sometimes longer.

That number didn’t feel possible. And yet, the data didn’t lie. My screen time was absurd.

As the CEO of a digital marketing agency, this might surprise you, but I believe smartphones can be dangerous. They democratize access to tools and information and add a lot of efficiency to our lives. But they also create isolation, loneliness, and a strange fantasy world where perception perpetually usurps reality.

Social media is not real. People posture. They front. They project success while privately struggling. And once you project a fake image, you’re trapped in the lie.

I see this constantly in business. I ask someone how things are going. “We’re crushing it.” A week later, they shut down or quietly get a job. Phones and social media amplify this dishonesty. Not because people are bad, but because the system rewards it.

Once I accepted that I had a problem, I started experimenting. Using Screen Time, it became obvious where and how I was wasting time. The first shock was social media. I was clocking an hour or more of doom-scrolling before I even left for the gym at 6:45 a.m.

How is that possible?

Unfortunately, it happened often, and easily.

The first move was deleting unnecessary social media apps that sucked my time with little to no benefit. TikTok, Bluesky, and X were the first to go. Once they were gone, I didn’t miss them at all.

Facebook came next.

Before you say, “I could never do that because people send me things all the time,” here’s what I did. I deleted the app from my phone, but I can still click through in the browser when someone texts me a link. I’m not completely off of Facebook, but without the app, I rarely go there, and almost always in response to something sent to me.

Instagram and Reddit stayed, but with shrinking limits. First thirty minutes per day, then twenty, then fifteen. Now they’re limited to ten minutes per day each. On days I don’t hit those limits, it feels like I’m beating my addiction.

Shoot, do I really even need Reddit on my phone? Another app is about to bite the dust.

With social media under control, I started noticing other distraction traps. Zillow. LoopNet. Amazon. All provide the ability to endlessly doom scroll and most allowing me to fantasize about buying things I didn’t need. Or worse, making impulse purchases out of boredom. Google News was no better and resulted in too much time consuming negative, fake, or political news that added nothing to my life.

Another gotcha, email. Do I really need to be checking my email constantly? No. Email is asynchronous by design. It can wait till I'm ready to read it.

One by one, these apps got time limits or they were deleted entirely.

If something truly mattered, I could do it on my laptop. Adding that small amount of friction mattered. The phone is for escape. The laptop is intentional.

The moment that really hit me was learning that the iPhone tracks how often you pick up your phone. Even after I got my screen time under two hours per day, I was picking up my phone 73 times a day on average.

That’s insane.

Every 13 minutes, from the start of my day to the very end, I was “just checking.” What a waste of time and attention. What an addiction I had.

Notifications had been off for years except for calls and calendar alerts. So what was I even looking for?

The answer was that I was looking for something. I was looking for something I couldn’t even define. In reality, I was looking for anything. I was living a life of FOMO.

Not as a New Year’s resolution, but at the beginning of January, I decided enough was enough. I was going to break the addiction. I set a personal goal of keeping screen time under one hour per day, and I actively resisted picking up my phone when the urge hit.

It was hard. The first few days were uncomfortable. I felt the urge constantly. I caught myself wanting to physically reach for it. I thought about it all the time. That lasted three or four days, and then the temptation quietly passed.

As strong as the addiction had been, and as long as I’d had it, it turned out it only took a few days to go away.

I still resist the urge today, even though it’s much less frequent. What I’ve discovered is that I now regularly ignore my phone for hours at a time. I’ve even lost track of it completely, unsure whether I left it in the house, the garage, the truck, or somewhere else.

It’s just not that important to me anymore.

That feeling is freedom.

With all that newfound freedom, I had a new problem … What to do with all the extra time?

What replaced it surprised me. Reading, of course. Listening to vinyl records. Working on the house.

And even sitting with my thoughts. I know it’s kind of weird to just sit there doing nothing. Sometimes something’s on my mind. Other times it isn’t. I’m perfectly content sitting on the lanai with little stimulus beyond nature, my cats, and my wife.

And then there are conversations. Real conversations. My wife and I sit on the couch, listen to vinyl over a drink, and talk for an hour. Deep conversations. Real connection. That alone made this worth it.

I want to learn chess. I’m about to restart meditation. I’m thinking about buying a telescope to feed my lifelong obsession with space.

I’m not anti-technology. I run digital agencies doing millions of dollars a year. This is about personal agency and choosing how I spend my time and attention. It’s about designing my environment instead of being manipulated by it.

We are all addicts. The phone was engineered that way.

If you’ve been thinking about becoming a digital minimalist too, start small. Look at your screen time. Put limits on the apps you know are stealing your life. Design the life you want instead of defaulting to what Silicon Valley wants you to do.

This newsletter exists to help agency owners run profitable businesses that give them more time, more sales, and the ability to grow without burning out. If you want clearer thinking, better decisions, and a business that serves your life instead of consuming it, subscribe at businessofagency.com.

I hope this gives you something to think about.

— Erik