How Do Celebrities Without Smartphones Get Anything Done?

The list of celebrities without smartphones is short, and stranger than you'd guess — one of them answers email roughly once a week, and another still takes messages by fax machine. This isn't a detox week or a retreat in the hills. Ed Sheeran, Elton John, Dolly Parton and Christopher Walken have each built a working life around not carrying a phone at all.

Sheeran gave his up in 2015 and never replaced it. He has said he was losing real-life interaction, that the phone left him overwhelmed and sitting in a low place, and that the constant expectation of an instant reply was the part he couldn't take. So he bought an iPad, pushed everything onto email, and set his own schedule for reading it.

Why should any of this matter to a reader in Mumbai or Meerut? Because of the number sitting underneath it. Consultancy EY estimated that Indians spent 1.1 trillion hours on their smartphones in 2024 — about five hours a day per user, with roughly 70% of that going to social media, video and gaming, according to Bloomberg. Sheeran's response to that same pull was to delete the device from his life entirely.

The Man Who Reads His Email Once a Week

Sheeran's setup goes further than most people realise. He has no number to hand out. Taylor Swift explained on The Tonight Show that reaching him means email, and that a FaceTime call only happens when somebody physically brings him an iPad. The trade is stark: he is uncontactable for days at a stretch. What he gets back, by his own account, is boredom — the dead minutes where a melody turns up instead of a feed.

I just was losing real-life interaction, so I got rid of it, I got an iPad, I moved everything onto email, which I reply to once a week.

A Luddite With Someone Else Running His Instagram

Elton John is blunter about it. On Jimmy Kimmel Live he said he simply doesn't want a phone, and he has cheerfully called himself a Luddite — no mobile, no computer of his own, an iPad at most. Calls route through an assistant. His Instagram, which posts steadily, is handled by his husband David Furnish. The account is active; the man whose name is on it doesn't touch it.

He isn't the oldest example either. Christopher Walken, 82, told Stephen Colbert he owns neither a phone nor a computer, comparing the handset to a watch he never got around to wearing. And it isn't only older stars: Michael Cera, 37, told The Hollywood Reporter that skipping the smartphone was a deliberate choice made out of fear, after watching a friend type emails straight through lunch.

How Celebrities Without Smartphones Actually Stay Reachable

None of these people are off-grid. They have moved the interface onto somebody else — a spouse, a paid assistant, a machine humming in an office. That's the part that quietly doesn't transfer to an ordinary life, and each workaround is worth looking at on its own terms.

Dolly Parton's Fax-to-Text Chain

Parton, 80, is famously reachable by fax. Her goddaughter Miley Cyrus described the process on Late Night: a note written by hand, scanned and faxed across, then converted into a text message at the other end, always signed off personally. It works beautifully. It also needs staff standing at both ends feeding paper into machines.

Ed Sheeran's Borrowed iPad

The tablet isn't in his pocket, which is the whole point — someone has to fetch it. Weekly email means a manager, a label and a full team absorbing anything that can't wait seven days. Try running that arrangement with a landlord, a school principal or a bank relationship manager.

Justin Bieber and the Relapse

Bieber told Billboard in 2021 that dropping his phone taught him boundaries, and he framed it as a mental health decision. He has since been photographed holding one. That detail is arguably the most useful in the whole list: even with unlimited money and staff, the position is hard to hold.

Where the Celebrity Version Falls Apart in India

Here the phone stopped being a social gadget a long time ago. It's identity infrastructure. Aadhaar OTPs, UPI payments at the vegetable cart, DigiLocker, income tax e-verification, IRCTC bookings, the school WhatsApp group, hospital appointment slots. Going phoneless in India isn't a lifestyle statement — it's closer to walking out of the banking system. A basic feature phone can still catch an OTP, but a growing number of services now assume you have an app open.

What You Can Copy Without Binning Your Handset

The transferable part was never the hardware. It's the scheduling. Sheeran replies weekly because he decided when replies happen; the sender doesn't. A workable version of that is two fixed message windows a day, notifications killed for everything except actual calls, and the phone charging in another room after 10pm. That alone claws back a chunk of those five hours.

The honest lesson from the celebrities without smartphones isn't that phones are evil — it's that all of them replaced the device with a person. You probably can't hire one. So pick the single app that eats the most of your evening, check your own screen time report this week, and set a limit on that one thing. Watch whether the number moves in a fortnight. If it doesn't, the problem was never the app.