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Home > Celestial Blood > This aspiring journalist switched to a flip phone. How’d it go?
Podcast: Celestial Blood
Episode:

This aspiring journalist switched to a flip phone. How’d it go?
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-02-12 20:00:00
Description: You’ve probably heard of “Dry January” — a month-long abstention from alcohol to start the year. Well, what about Flip Phone February? It’s a challenge to swear off your iPhone or Android, and return to the app-free, T9-texting days of the Motorola Razr. Daisy Woelfling, a creative industries student at Toronto Metropolitan University, recently published a Substack about switching to a flip phone in July 2022, and she recommends others do too. “I was tired of wasting time on my smartphone. I wanted to cut down on my procrastination and spend my time more productively. That was the main motivation for me,” she tells KCRW. Woelfling had tried other strategies to reduce her screen time, but they weren’t effective, so she turned to a more extreme solution. Making the switch, fortunately, was simple. “You can look for a flip phone in-store, online. Make sure it's compatible with your cell phone carrier. And just take your SIM card and pop it in the back, and you're good to go.” Woelfling says she used a few different models over two years, which allowed calls and texts, but the quality of photos and videos came out so poor that the camera was pointless. However, she still turned to her laptop to use apps like Instagram — though less frequently. She says she had always limited social media, so this wasn’t a massive change. While her friends were supportive, she says, her mom was critical because Woelfling became tougher to reach. As for benefits of the “dumb” phone, she lists: “I instantly felt more present and connected to the world around me. Definitely procrastinated less. My attention span got longer. And because of that, I just felt happier and more content in the day to day. … It's so much easier to strike a work-life balance. And I think the most surprising, my sense of direction got better without Google Maps, for sure. And it also had a lot of shock value. People were very surprised that I was choosing to do this, that it became a conversation starter, for sure.” The main downside was the inability to listen to music when commuting, Woelfling says. Still, she got a Discman to play CDs, plus a digital camera, and a little voice recorder for conducting interviews. “I've got quite the stash.” However, in summer 2024, Woelfling converted back to her smartphone. That was because she started an internship at a local news publication and realized she couldn’t do it without the tech. “I was being sent on assignment to various parts of the city every day, and often it was very short notice. And there wouldn't be a way for me to get there without having Google Maps on hand. And we would communicate with Slack. And it would be impossible to try and do that internship and have a flip phone.” She adds, “I miss my flip phone every day. I did realize that in the long run, it would be impractical for the line of work [journalism] I want to get into. But if I could find a job where using a flip phone was not a deal breaker, I would switch back in a heartbeat.”
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