The phone that does everything

Many years ago I read an article about how to spend less time on your phone. One of the tips was really simple: on an iPhone you can set up a shortcut that switches the screen to black and white. Great, something easy, I thought. I turned it on, started using it — and pretty quickly it started to annoy me. It was inconvenient, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, I kept switching it off. So I gave up.

Recently something changed. I’ve been cleaning social media apps out of my phone. But even after that I noticed that whenever I got bored I automatically reached for my phone and started tapping on it. Just tapping. Not even looking at anything in particular.

That’s when it hit me. A phone is an incredibly well-made device. It’s magically good at everything — the industrial design, the hardware, the whole experience. It was great from the very first iPhone, and it only gets better. It’s basically a fidget toy, and an amazing one. Add endless content on top of that, and those two things together took the phone in an unexpected direction. It used to be a tool — “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator”, as Steve Jobs introduced it. Now it’s basically our main source of entertainment. It’s always in your pocket, it’s incredibly pleasant to use, and it has everything. And this thought was scary.

Selling it to my brain

When I first tried black and white mode, my mistake was thinking it would magically fix everything by itself. It doesn’t. My phone is still a really useful tool, and I don’t want to make it harder to use or add annoying pop-ups like “Are you sure you want to open this app?” — “Yes, I’m sure, I just tapped on it, leave me alone!” That’s irritating, and it doesn’t work. I needed to explain to my brain why it should accept this black and white inconvenience.

So when I told myself: let’s use black and white mode to teach the brain that the phone is not a source of entertainment, but a useful tool — it suddenly worked.

Then came the other screens

What other screens do I have? A computer. It’s just as easy to set up a shortcut there to switch between black and white and colour. I tried it, and it looks great — I can do part of my work in black and white with no problems at all.

Next — the TV. Some things are even better to watch that way. I was watching the US Open (a tennis tournament), and it’s much nicer in black and white: calm, no screaming colours, no stupid flashy ads. Just two players and the ball, it’s very clear what’s happening, and my attention doesn’t wander all over the screen. Then again — this is what works for me.

Three effects this change has had on me:

  1. Screens stop being default entertainment. The TV, fine, but the computer and the phone? What’s there to tap on? It’s all black and white. I’ll look for entertainment somewhere else.
  2. Less sensory overload. In the real world, light bounces off a surface into your eyes. A screen produces the light and shines it straight at you, and it can show much brighter, more vivid and more saturated colours than we find in nature. And it turns out these bright colours put more strain on my brain. Now, when I switch from black and white to colour, it feels like walking out of a dark room into bright sunlight — everything on the screen starts screaming at me and I want to switch back right away. Same screen, same work, but less load on my system, so I get less tired.
  3. Digital and real life split apart. Before, you’d look out of the window and see colours — sunshine, green trees, blue sky — then look at the screen and see the same colourful world on the screen. Now there’s a clear line: the digital world is black and white, it’s where I work. Everything else stays in colour. So when I want those colours, I don’t look at a screen — I look out of the window or go for a walk. Which, you’ll agree, is a much healthier situation.

How to set it up

iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters → Grayscale. Then Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut → Color Filters, and triple-click the side button to switch.

Mac: first choose the filter. Go to System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Color filters and set the filter type to Grayscale. You can leave the switch itself off. Then make a toggle in the Shortcuts app:

  1. Open Shortcuts, create a new shortcut (+) and call it something like “Black and white”.
  2. Search the actions for “Set Color Filters”, add it and set it to Toggle.
  3. Open the shortcut’s details (the ⓘ button on the right). Click “Add Keyboard Shortcut” and press the key combination you want.
  4. In the same panel, turn on “Pin in Menu Bar” to get a button at the top of the screen.
  5. To get a button in the Dock, choose File → Add to Dock (macOS Sonoma or later).

Now a key press, the menu bar button or one click in the Dock switches the screen between black and white and colour.

TV: look for colour or saturation in the picture settings, or for a colour filter / grayscale option in the accessibility settings. Every brand hides it somewhere different.