The Samsung Galaxy SII. That’s been my phone for the past year or so. I used to hate it. This past week, everything changed.

Far and away my biggest gripe about the phone is its meager battery life. The quoted use time for the phone’s battery is 8.7 hours. I guess, depending on how much you’re talking, SnapChatting, or whatever, your mileage may vary.

“The damn phone can’t even get through an entire day on one charge! How worthless is this??”  –Me.

I’ve gone through a number of phases in confronting this issue.

Phase One: Phone “babysitting.”

For sure, one of the most prevalent and under-reported user experience traumas of the modern era. Here’s what I’m talking about:

• It’s 10:00pm, and your phone only has 10% of its battery life left, and you have to be crazy vigilant about phone and feature use.
• It’s 10:05pm and, now concerned about your phone being low on battery, you check the screen incessantly to monitor progress. You’re down to 8% because you’ve turned the phone on and off 37 times in the last five minutes.
• You’re out with a buddy and have to rely on him for Google Maps so you can save your juice in case of emergency.
• You make sure all your other friends have your buddy’s cell number because you’re going to turn your phone off for a while.
• You set your phone brightness slider almost all the way to zero, and now you can only read anything under a bright light at a good angle.
• You turn off your data plan or your GPS or whatever other fancy feature that the phone touts as core functionality.
• Your phone dies anyway. It’s 10:08pm.

You’ve got the idea. This sucks.

Phase Two: Proactive phone management. I’d switch my phone to airplane mode for hours at times when I wasn’t actively expecting communication. In fact — and, I know, this is *really* crazy — I’d actually turn my phone completely off during movies, on airplanes, in classes, and the like.

On the balance, being disconnected every once in a while is probably not such a bad thing. But that’s not what I signed up for. I wanted a phone that was at my complete disposal at all times, and as I’ve written before, I didn’t want the ever-incrementally-mounting headache of having to deal with phone minutia throughout the day for my entire life.

Phase Three: I brought a charger to work and charged my phone during afternoons. This felt stupid.

Phase Four: I picked up a case for the phone that had an extended battery built in. Sort of like this one.

This effectively solved the battery problem, but it created others. Specifically: my phone was now large enough to win modest disapproval from the King of all Cosmos. (In other words, it was the size of a small planet.)

My phone+case now barely fit into my pocket. It probably looked ridiculous. In a silo, I didn’t mind. The phone passed my criteria of “fits in my pocket” and “lasts an entire day.” Size for battery life was a good trade.

Stepping out of the silo and into the real world, I found that my phone’s girth prompted me having to explain myself for three minutes any time a friend saw it, ever. No thanks.

Luckily, the thing broke anyway.

Phase Five: Anger/Frustration/Despair.

Phase Six: The re-frame, and the eureka moment.

At long last, I finally internally raised a critical defining question:

“WHY is it a requirement that my phone lasts an ENTIRE day on a single charge?” —Me again.

This is the fundamental reason why really smart design thinking companies like IDEO base so much of their methodology on the concept of “framing.”

Here’s what I mean: A modern laptop with a “great” battery life will last something like five or six hours on a single charge. (Granted, the technology is improving — but that’s not the point.) Invariably, if you take your laptop out somewhere, and plan on using it longer than just through your cup of coffee, you know to bring a charger with you. Nobody has a fundamental problem with this.

Why doesn’t the same framework hold for your cellphone?

I largely blame Nokia. Because you, and I, and everyone else on the planet got accustomed to using a modern cellphone when we owned a phone in the Nokia 3300 series. Which looked like this:

Things you should immediately notice or recall:

• The screen is tiny
• There are no colors
• You played Snake instead of Angry Birds
• The graphics were still pretty dope

What you might not readily recall:

1. The battery life on this phone was astronomical, probably for all the same reasons the modern Amazon Kindle can go several weeks on a single charge.
2. As a result, you probably didn’t even charge the phone every single night. (Can you imagine?)

In many regards, phones evolved incrementally from this point on (I guess an iPhone fanboy might argue differently) — screen sizes inched up, pixel density demands followed suit, and battery life capacities receded from “sure, what’s an extra three nights without a charge?” to “every night or bust” to a modern society, where people babysit phones, and where the best seat when you’re traveling by plane is not in first class but the one seat in the waiting area that’s next to the wall power outlet.

Another relevant, subtle phenomenon: More so than I think with any other device, people seem to innately care about conserving the quality of their cell phone battery. One theory is that every time you recharge your phone, the battery suffers because it thus has fewer charge cycles, or something. In fact, there are all kinds of conflicting fan theories — google it, if you want to learn nothing for 20 minutes — but suffice it to say, I’ve never heard or seen the same level of concern raised for the battery in your laptop, TV remote, Xbox controller, or anything. Many (myself, until this past week, included) would sooner risk their cell phone dying prematurely in the night than put undue burden on a piece of equipment that, worst case, probably costs around $30 to replace.

So, no more. It’s 3:30PM at time of writing this sentence, and my phone is plugged in and charging. 8.7 hours is now plenty of time to get through anything day-to-day, day or night.

You’ll notice, if you actually bothered reading all 1100 words here, that I’d actually already uncovered this solution weeks ago in “Phase 3.” Here lies the inherent power of framing, and perhaps, of marketing: I was able to fix the problem not by adjusting the product (expensive), but by adjusting the frame and worldview (free).