Addicted to digital technology? Here's how to beat the habit | Oliver Burkeman

Banning yourself can have the perverse effect of making your phone more enticing. What you need to do is make it boring

Recently, I bought a piece of digital technology to help me conquer my low-level addiction to digital technology. Yes, yes, I know this makes me sound like a sucker, no better than those techno-junkies who queue overnight at the Apple store for an early glimpse at the meaninglessness of their lives. But bear with me: Ditto, which costs about 30, is a thimble-sized contraption that clips to my belt and vibrates when I get texts or calls from specific people. So I can stash my phone in my bag, out of sight and reach, confident I'll be contactable for, say, a baby emergency. (Or by the editor of Guardian Weekend. Obviously!) You can use the iPhone's "do not disturb" feature to do something similar; but last year, researchers showed that just having a phone in your sightline impairs your cognitive capacities. By contrast, Ditto replicates all the secret joy of accidentally leaving your phone at home, with none of the accompanying panic.

Readers even more curmudgeonly than I am may mutter that if I have such a tortured relationship with my phone, I should just get rid of it - downgrade to a dumbphone, maybe. Didn't we manage fine before smartphones came along? The trouble is that smartphones, like most technology, aren't simply bad. They're worse: a diabolical mixture of bad and very good. I love receiving photos of the baby while I'm at work; I love FaceTiming with faraway friends; I just hate the compulsion to stare absently at the web every five minutes. That's the smartphone's whole trick: all those addictive apps are essentially parasites.