Loup Ventures of Minneapolis tries to break spell of iPhones in our lives

Half of the people who work at Loup Ventures in Minneapolis just went a week without their Apple iPhones, hoping to see how compulsive use of smartphones may be getting in the way of getting their most valuable work done or maybe just enjoying their day.

If one thing comes across in managing partner Doug Clinton's essay on their experience, it's the sense of freedom he enjoyed.

That some co-workers decided to try going without smartphones maybe doesn't seem that newsworthy, but Loup isn't a regular investment firm. These folks are genuine true believers in technology, looking forward to things like artificial intelligence and robotics making all our lives a lot richer and easier.

It's great to see tech enthusiasts giving the rest of us a big heads-up on what's clearly unhealthy for us, but there was a far more important lesson to be learned here. If we want to be free of our smartphones, it seems, at least for a while it's going to be up to us.

The Silicon Valley titans have every incentive to keep us all hooked. That's not changing.

In some ways, people's inability to control their smartphone use is an old story, going back years to when business users at the airport or in the downtown skyways would mindlessly scroll through their BlackBerry gadgets.

Since that time the industry has become more shrewd at making applications that "engage" users.

One human trait tech firms know all about is that people crave little rewards. How many "likes" a social media post gets can matter enough to spend all day checking for them.

Being too connected with work has only gotten worse, too, with a growing problem called response anxiety. A message just can't go without a response, never mind its unimportance or that it came half-hour past bedtime. And when your message in reply whooshes off, you expect whoever gets it to treat yours with the same urgency.

Great technology products have a way of rewarding users and leading them to use the product more, Clinton said in a conversation last week. "That can be in good ways, and that can be in bad ways. Social media companies understand human psychology really well and have leveraged that to make their products even more addicting."

The phone is just the conduit to time-consuming apps, but Apple wants to keep selling ever fancier new phones just like Facebook wants to keep eyeballs on its apps. About the best that can be expected from big technology companies, Clinton said, are tools to show users how they have really been using tech products.

The Loup team started thinking a lot more about these problems after talking in the last year with the creators of the Light Phone, a stripped-down phone launched on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in 2015.

The original Light Phone was about the size of a credit card and could make phone calls and store nine phone numbers, and that was about it. No Facebook, no Snapchat, no way to get an e-mail from the boss.

You Gen Xers or boomers must be thinking, we once had mobile phones kind of like that. They worked great.

The company has since announced a data network-connected Light Phone. But it's still not nearly as capable of derailing an hour of work as the latest smartphones.

The Loup Ventures folks haven't kept in close touch with the Light Phone's creators, but they never really stopped thinking about the business opportunity in addressing tech addiction or the personal benefits of "going light," as it's apparently called.

Finally, they decided that for a week this month, four of them would power down their iPhones and rely just on the latest iteration of the Apple Watch. Even though it's been designed to work paired with an iPhone, the newest Watch can use some popular iPhone applications and connects to a cellular network for calls. The experiment allowed them to use connected earbuds, too, and not have to talk into a gadget on their wrists like Dick Tracy calling for backup.

In the test the Apple Watch graded out at no better than a "B." Calls would sometimes not go through, dialing long numbers and access codes to get into conference calls was a pain, and so on.

One of the four in the test, missing his iPhone's map on a business trip and unable to get an Uber ride, gave up before the week was out. He apparently never heard it's also possible to hail a cab.

As the week wrapped up, the team looked back and grouped how they spend their time into what's called the Eisenhower matrix, sorting tasks by their importance as well as urgency. The upper left-hand corner of the four-quadrant box will list tasks that are urgent and important, and those listed in the lower right-hand corner are neither.

They found they had eliminated the lower half of the box, both urgent and unimportant things like responding to a message as well as activities in the lower right that are simply a waste of time, like social media scrolling.

Without losing so much time on their phones, they found more time for the most important work of the firm, upper right-hand quadrant tasks like reading research or planning that they usually put off because something else seemed urgent.

Clinton seemed delighted to be free from his constant e-mail, too. Teenagers unable to get off Instagram and Snapchat are a popular stereotype, but Clinton said he sees business people who compulsively message each other as behaving pretty much the same. Newer workplace message systems like Slack have only made it worse.

Clinton had already gotten rid of a bunch of iPhone apps before the weeklong trial. But these phones really can be useful, too, and he's not giving them up. His latest idea is putting an old iPhone back into service for just what he called "the essentials" — maps, the Uber and Lyft ride-hailing apps and text messaging. And, of course, the ability to receive telephone calls.

As he put it, "can anything be truly urgent and important if someone isn't willing to call you about it?"

lee.schafer@startribune.com 612-673-4302