Tech that disappears.

In September 1991, Mark Weiser, who ran the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC, published an essay in Scientific American called “The Computer for the 21st Century.” His argument was that the most profound technologies are the ones that disappear, receding into the background of daily life until nobody notices them. Writing and electric motors had gone that way, and he expected computers to follow. He was right that they would become everywhere. He could not have known how rarely they would be allowed to become invisible.

The phone in your pocket is a marvel of engineering, and much of what runs on it is paid for by attention. Free apps earn their money from advertising, and advertising pays by the minute and the tap. The result is a device that behaves badly when you are not using it. It lights up, buzzes and counts your unread messages in red, all to bring you back. A good tool finishes its job and goes quiet. The useful test for any device is how it behaves when you are not holding it.

Those of us who grew up with a console already know what the alternative feels like. The Nintendo in the living room did nothing until you pressed the power button, and when you pressed it again, it stayed off until you chose otherwise. Nobody wants to go back to a phone that only makes calls. The goal is narrower and more achievable, which is a phone that speaks when it has something to say from a person you know, and otherwise waits.

Start with notifications, which is where most of the damage is done. Go through the list app by app, and leave on messages from people, phone calls and your calendar. Turn off everything else, including news, shopping, social media, games and the bank’s marketing. A red badge is not information. It is a request, made on someone else’s schedule, for a moment of your attention.

Some alerts are worth having but not worth having right away. On an iPhone, Scheduled Summary, found under Settings and then Notifications, gathers them and delivers them in batches at the times you choose, and two a day, at lunch and at six, is plenty. On Android, you can mark an app’s alerts as silent, so they wait in the notification shade without a sound or a pop-up.

Color does a great deal of the work of pulling you back. Remove it, and the phone becomes useful, dull and easy to put down. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text Size, then Color Filters, and choose Grayscale. On most Android phones, Bedtime mode in Digital Wellbeing can turn the screen gray on a schedule, and many models also offer grayscale among their accessibility settings.

Grayscale lasts only if you can undo it in a second for maps and photographs. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Accessibility Shortcut, and select Color Filters. After that, three quick presses of the side button switch color on and off, or three presses of the Home button on older models. The dull screen becomes the default, and color becomes something you ask for.

The most effective setting, however, is not in the phone at all. It is the location of the charger. A phone that sleeps beside the bed is the last thing you see at night and the first thing you reach for in the morning, before you have decided anything about the day. Move the charger to the kitchen or the hall, buy a plain alarm clock and put a book where the phone used to be. The phone will still be there after coffee, and you will meet it on your terms.

The same test applies to everything else in the drawer. A single USB-C charger with two or three ports can now run nearly every device most people carry. An e-ink reader holds a library, has no feed and runs for weeks on a charge. A simple watch tells the time without telling you about your email. Every device you remove is one less thing to update, charge, carry and lose.

When the phone itself needs replacing, last year’s flagship costs less and does nearly everything the new one does. Software support has also lengthened considerably. Google promises seven years of updates for the Pixel 8 and later models, Samsung promises seven years for the Galaxy S24 and later, and Apple has a long record of supporting iPhones for years after release. When the battery fades, check its maximum capacity in the battery settings. If it has fallen toward 80 percent, a new battery is usually a small repair that buys the phone several more years.

Once a month, look at the screen-time report your phone already keeps and delete one app you opened out of habit rather than need. The larger habit is a question worth asking of every device and every app you own, which is whether it serves you or you serve it. Weiser imagined machines so well behaved that we would forget they were there. We will not get that from the companies that make them, but with an hour of settings and a charger in the kitchen, we can get surprisingly close on our own.