I Know I Can (Do It)

Something that I’m working on is changing my cell phone plan. Right now, I’m on an unlimited plan with one of the major providers at $40/line. I started hearing about MVNOs, which are wholesale cell service providers that rent towers from the major providers. You may not be able to go month-to-month but have to prepay for service in 3, 6 or 12 month blocks. After doing some research, I decided to consider Mint Mobile’s 8GB plan at $20-25/mth, depending on how much I prepay for. Taking a look at some of my past usage, I was average at around 14 GB for my line alone. The question was whether I would be able to successfully reduce my internet mobile usage from an average of 14GB down to 8GB?

I had the sincere will to curtail my usage, but knew that it wouldn’t be easy. One major change was using wi-fi more, when I need access to the Internet. When I’m at home, it’s on wi-fi until I leave. Also, I will selectively use wi-fi, while out in public. Also, I went through the cellular usage settings on my iPhone and switched off the non-essential apps that can wait until I get on wi-fi that I don’t use on a regular basis. Lastly, I started putting my phone on airplane for large stretches of time, especially during my East Coast trip.

This last step was the most intriguing one and it flipped my thinking regarding how I can intentionally use my phone. I was tagging along on the trip, so there wasn’t anything really urgent that I needed to address. There wasn’t any sort of emergency that I would need to be contacted. If someone needed to get ahold of me, I could always contact them at a later time. In addition, besides using low power mode and dark mode (I’m beta testing iOS 13), it’ll help to stretch out my battery life.

As I had the goal of keeping my internet usage for this current phone cycle under 8GB and I was cutting it close, I turned off quite a few non-essential app notifications. Awhile back, I thought that I had turned off a bunch. However, until I finished this last round, I hadn’t realized how many were left.

It was amazingly refreshing for me to call the shots of how I interact with my phone. Do the notifications that still appear provide me useful information that improves my life? I could even question whether the apps on phone make a similarly substantial improvement in my life? In regards to selectively using airplane mode, are there probably more instances, when I could benefit from using it, so that I could focus on doing higher level work?

I suppose that you could say that I returned with three powerful realizations regarding my mobile phone use: I could reduce my data usage to justify something less than an unlimited plan; there are relatively few app notifications that are truly necessary; and, there are times, when I could leave my phone on airplane mode. While I do rely heavily on my phone to stay organized and to communicate with the world regarding this blog, I don’t have to be ruled by it and I won’t be ruled by it.

What I will do is continue to work on using it mindfully, while taking even more steps to be able to save some money along the way.

PS: as of the last evening of my current phone cycle, I’m at 7.45 GB used.