I tried grayscale mode on my iPhone for 7 days

Here's what happened: what worked, what did not work and how I felt about it.

Earlier this month, I shared a newsletter about reducing smartphone addiction by activating grayscale mode on our phone.

The idea, backed by evidence, is that by removing the bright colors from our smartphones, we will make the screen less stimulating, and therefore use it less.

Scrolling becomes less stimulating.

The piece was very well received, and I got a few texts from friends telling me they had tried it immediately after reading it.

📩 “It’s been two days I put grayscale mode and I must say it works.”

Obviously, I am my favorite guinea pig and I was trying it as well.
So, for the next seven days, I used my iPhone exclusively in grayscale mode.

⬇️ Here’s how it went ⬇️

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What worked

Let’s start by the results.
Pretty telling.

Yes, almost 5 hours is a lot, in line with the latest statistics though.

• 📱 Screen time reduced by 19%

• 🔓 Number of screen activations (i.e. pickups) reduced by 6%.

To be fair, I use my phone a lot, mostly for emails, Substack, messaging and Youtube, so my total screen time did not shock me.

I also suspect that knowing I was running this experiment made me more disciplined. But even if half of the reduction was just my extra motivation, a 10% cut in screen time is still a win.

Don’t you say?

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How did it feel?

Liberating, but weird.

I lost interest in using video-image-heavy apps like Instagram, Youtube and Netflix, and overall lost interest in using the phone altogether.

I lacked the enjoyment of using it.

It felt liberating, but at the same time it felt a bit scary knowing how much of my phone use was mindless. We pick up our phones constantly, and often without a specific reason.

And when we see ourselves doing this “automatic” gesture, without a purpose, it’s “The horror! The horror!”.

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What did not work

The first 48 hours were “rough”.

This is not how you usually change a habit (i.e small, gradual steps).
This was cold turkey. One minute my phone was in full color. The next, everything was gray.

I put it back to the colored version a few times, but managed to immediately get back to grayscale.

It’s crazy to think that black and white was the norm 20 years ago.

What’s crazy is that black-and-white screens were the norm just 20 years ago. Now, using the phone without color feels like a major regression, as if I were giving up something I had rightfully earned (remember “loss aversion”?).

Once I pushed through those first 48 hours, things got easier.

My phone became less interesting, and I naturally started picking it up less often.

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Conclusion

I decided to keep the experiment for another week to see if the screen time reduction will be stronger, as suggested in the paper analyzed here.

After that I think I’ll keep grayscale mode on after 6 PM on weekdays and throughout the weekend.

I like the idea of knowing I’ll be using my phone less in those hours.

If you’ve tried grayscale mode (or plan to), let me know how it goes.

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The most interesting video I watched this week

The video is a general audience deep dive into the Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology that powers ChatGPT and related products. It covers the full training stack of how the models are developed, along with mental models of how to think about their "psychology", and how to get the best use them in practical applications.

The video was made by Andrej Karpathy, founding member at OpenAI (2015) and then Sr. Director of AI at Tesla (2017-2022). He is now a founder at Eureka Labs, which is building an AI-native school.

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📩 Here’s what you might have missed on Getting Better:

• What to do to stop procrastination

• Isaac Asimov on Creativity

• The 9 best podcast episodes of 2024

• The 5 laws of human stupidity

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See you all next Sunday 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo