How I cut my doomscrolling: six months with a Mudita Kompakt

By Terry, who built PlainPhones · 30 October 2026

I have an addiction to YouTube, or at least a compulsion to check it more often than is necessary. This has been going on for years, so six months ago I decided that I had enough and that I needed to do something about it. So I did this totally crazy thing and I bought myself a minimalist phone, the Mudita Kompakt. It is an e-ink device and has no browsing capability, no video, and takes pictures in black and white (but you can send them and they will be in colour), no live maps like Google Maps (only basic offline ones), and only SMS for staying in touch.

In addition to that, I signed up for a service called NextDNS which allows you to block your own devices from accessing pages where you feel you waste your time (or would not be safe for kids, etc). Basically a custom block list that I've installed on my laptop and my now retired iPhone. Without the blocking rules I don't think I would have been as successful as I have been on reducing my doomscrolling and time wasting on the internet.

Some caveats first. I am not a purist, so I still keep my iPhone with me most days BUT it has been set up to block media that I don't want AND it is not my primary phone because it has no data plan. When I do need to use maps or look something up through a browser, I can enable a wifi hotspot on the Mudita Kompakt and temporarily give myself access to the internet, minus the sites I block. This is useful for still using Apple Pay for most of my transactions, looking up directions on Google Maps, or streaming music. The difference is that it is not the primary thing to reach for, and often I do go out without it and just take the Mudita.

So what have the results been? In a word: fantastic. My ignorance about the latest shenanigans and general bullsh*t happening out there has reached an all time high. My reported screentime on my phone, which is still an automatic feature of the iPhone, is at an all time low. My anxiety is also much improved. And my goal to set a good example for my kids is going very well.

I do still use the iPhone at home to get a recipe from Claude or leave a voice text (iMessage still works), and I do the weekly food shop through the Walmart app as well. All in all, this is working great, and I have no intention of making a smart phone my primary device any time soon.

I should mention some rough spots with the Mudita, though. For some reason, even though the call I'm making is working, the ringing sound doesn't always happen. And very occasionally, people have reported that they are getting notifications that the text they sent me hasn't been delivered (this only lasted a couple of days, so this may have nothing to do with the phone itself).

The e-ink display is great, but the fingerprint recognition on the Mudita does not work well enough that I could rely on it, so I had to turn it off and now I just use the password. I'm not someone who feels convenience is the most important thing in my life, so this is not something I care too much about, but someone else may find that annoying.

If you are scared of the idea of being completely cut off I really understand that. But what I found is that this is simply not the case, and that you will certainly feel better with a large reduction in your phone usage. One last thing I'll say is, feel free to come up with what works for you in terms of introducing friction. Some people go all the way and don't have any smart phone, and that's great, but for me still having one as a backup device (that is still disabled) has been a very workable compromise.

I encourage anyone with curiosity about this to give it a try. You may go back to your smart phone, but that is not a failure, this is an experiment. And if you really can't see yourself trying a dumb/minimalist phone, you can try NextDNS (I am not being paid by them, I just like the service), to introduce more friction to browsing the sites that are not serving you.

Feel free to reach out to me at terry@plainphones.com, even just to say 'Hi!'.