I’m a recovering iPhone addict

I’d like to preface this article by saying two things:

1. All technology is not bad just like all addicting substances are not bad. Alcohol in moderation is fine. Phone usage in moderation is fine. I absolutely love tech. The problem is the moderation.
2. I think it’s important to view excessive smartphone usage as an addiction. These things are engineered to be as addicting as possible and they do a damn good job at it.

Enjoy the read and hopefully this helps someone else or sparks a conversation around smartphone usage. Consciously setting up your world of tech can help you become so much happier and present in life. It sure did for me.

PART 1: MY ADDICTION

Hi my name is Jack and I am an addict. I’m 23 years old and I grew up as part of the last generation to experience childhood without being bombarded with devices. As I started to get older, I got to see the insane transformation of tech. Simple flip phones turned into sophisticated smartphones. Bulky box televisions turned into huge flat screens. Huge desktop computers turned into powerful mobile laptops.

I can remember life without a smartphone. I got my first iPhone in high school and before I knew what was happening, my life was controlled by it. Going to bed meant scrolling instagram for an hour. Waking up meant immediately checking my emails and notifications. Eating a meal meant watching YouTube videos on my phone. Sometimes I would just end up opening my phone and then staring at the screen not knowing why I even opened it in the first place.

An endless whirlwind of the red notification dots flowed onto my phone. My little red friends needed me and I’d be damned if I let them sit unnoticed for too long. And I know for a fact that this is the case for so many others out there. These devices run our lives.

When Apple released their screen time tracker a while back, I didn’t even want to check it because I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. When I eventually did look, my phone told me I was spending, on average, five hours per day looking at my phone. That’s 1,825 hours per year. I WAS SPENDING 76 DAYS OF MY FREAKING YEAR LOOKING AT THE SCREEN OF MY PHONE… The worst part is, that doesn’t even include the amount of time I spend on my computer.

If I am lucky enough to live another sixty years, that would come out to be roughly twelve and a half years spent on my phone. To me, that sounds so sad. It seems awfully dystopian to me, sort of like the future civilization in Wall-E.

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine,

“Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.”

That amount of iPhone usage is a disease. My brain was wired to seek out the rewards of my phone. And it’s not entirely our fault either.

I work in tech. As my job, I build products and features that encourage the holy grail of metrics, customer retention. I’ve helped start four tech companies that have raised over $3 million in venture capital and have been used my thousands of customers.

Getting a user to consistently come back and use your product means you’ve built something very valuable. There are entire books about this process. The products we use are engineered to take advantage of the way our brains work in order to be addicting. And I hope you know that every single other tech company out there is doing this.

If you don’t believe me, just google Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products written by Nir Eyal, a former Stanford professor. He lays out a 4 step process to “hook” a customer that uses the way our brain operates in order to get someone “hooked” (a nice sounding word for addicted) to a product. It’s kinda funny to me that this book is so highly regarded and well reviewed. It’s literally a blueprint to get someone addicted to something.

PART 2: HOW I CURED MY ADDICTION

Now onto the important part, what I did to cure my addiction. Below are the nine steps I took to get my phone usage down to under an hour per day. I’ll go into detail on each of them to hopefully help you find a solution that can work for you.

1. Manage your notifications
2. Delete all social media/endless scroll apps
3. Use a tablet to manage these cravings
4. Delete Widgets
5. Delete Siri suggestions
6. Black and white screen toggle
7. App organization
8. Replace deleted apps with quality content
9. Turn off Raise to Wake

1. Manage your notifications

If there is one thing you do based on this article, do this. Open your phone right now and count how many different red dots are on your screen. For me, I always had to click on these until they were gone. It was always a losing battle. So my solution was just turning them all off.

Go to Settings > Notifications > Choose an app > Toggle “Badges”

I’ve turned badges off for every single app besides the four that sit on the bottom navigation of my home screen: Phone, Messages, Email, and Slack. The four communication apps that I actually need to receive alerts from. Everything else has badges turned off. This step alone will clean up your phone tremendously. You’ll be amazed at how less cluttered your phone looks.

The next step to manage your notifications is to just turn them off altogether for unimportant apps. When someone sends you a text, it makes sense that you’d want to be notified about it. When your favorite food delivery app sends you a notification saying they miss you, that seems unnecessary. Following the same steps as before:

Go to Settings > Notifications > Choose an app > Toggle “Allow Notifications”

I started by turning a few of the apps off, but once I was conscious of the notifications that were getting sent to my phone, I ended up slowly turning off almost all of them outside of the important communication apps. The most important part is to just become conscious of these alerts and ask yourself if you need to be getting them. If the answer is no, turn them off. I can almost guarantee you’ll realize that most of them are complete bullshit.

This goes for emails as well and maybe I’ll write another article on how I’ve set my email up. Essentially, unsubscribe yourself from all the marketing emails you receive.

2. Delete all social media and other related apps from your phone

This one was hard. I’d be lying if I said I was able to do this in one try, but I’ve now had all social media and other endless scrolling apps (things like reddit) off my phone for 4 months. And I’m not lying when I say that I feel so much better without using them as much. The key to doing this successfully is not actually deleting your accounts. I love using social media and these other apps, but the problem for me was always using them in moderation.

I tried to use the screen time feature that restricts how much time you spend on an app but I always found myself ignoring the alerts. The only solution for my limited willpower was to remove them from my phone completely. For the first few days, I found myself unlocking my phone and clicking the screen where these apps used to be. But I promise you will feel so much better if you can do this.

3. Use a tablet to manage these cravings

If we are actually viewing excessive iPhone usage as an addiction, we need to treat it like any other addiction. Quitting cold turkey is pretty hard. Plus I still wanted to be using social media. My solution for this problem was an iPad.

This is where I house all my social media apps and other apps I use for entertainment. Paired with screen time limits that I set up in the iPad’s settings, this works great for me. Before doing this, I could just whip out my phone and mindlessly scrolling instantly. Now I can’t quickly access them.

To setup screen time limits on an iPad, follow these steps:

Settings > Screen Time > Select your device at the top > Click on an app in the most used section > Add limit

There are a couple ways to set limits, but I’ve found this is the best way to go about it as I can see the apps I’m using the most and add appropriate limits on an app by app basis.

So if I want to access these apps now, I have to make the conscious decision to pull out my clunkier iPad and open up one of these apps. It might sound like a small difference, but it really works.

My iPad stays put on my desk at home, it rarely comes with me during the day. This means I am able to limit my window of opportunity for using these apps to either the morning or night. Buying a tablet to manage this might sound like an expensive solution, but for me it was worth every penny.

4. Delete Widgets

I didn’t even know what a widget was until I started going through this process. Open up your phone and swipe left on your home screen. You should see a big list of different apps and previews. Now look at mine. The only widget I kept was the weather so I could quickly see it. Everything else got the boot.

To do this, scroll to the bottom of your widgets screen and select Edit. Then simply hit the red minus sign on all of these suckers. Only keep the ones you actually use. For me, it was just the weather.

5. Delete Siri suggestions

This one is a hidden trick. Personally I never use Siri and have her completely turned off. But you don’t need to do that, just turn off her app suggestions. If you open your phone up and swipe from the top to get to the search screen, you’ll notice it’s super cluttered with all sorts of stuff. Now look at mine. Nothing.

If I want to search for an app, I can still easily do that, but now I’m not tempted to open some random app or click on notifications that get displayed here.

Go to:

Settings > Siri & Search > Then toggle all the options under Siri Suggestions

6. Black and white screen toggle

This one blew my mind. I don’t think we realize just how beautiful these displays are. The colors, designs, and screens are incredible.

I want to give you a challenge. Turn your screen on black and white for one day. Then toggle it back to color. You will have your mind blown, I guarantee it.

Go to:

Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Color Filters >Grayscale

Then:

Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut > Color Filters

This will allow you to toggle black & white on/off by triple clicking the side button. I use it every now and then. Especially when I am trying to be productive. Being able to quickly toggle this is nice.

7. App organization

My phone has 3 pages of apps.

Page 1: This is where all my work, camera, and utility apps live. The goal of this screen is to have nothing that is used for entertainment. The screen consists of 4 folders on the left side of the screen. Utilities, Work, Finance, Photo & Video. The 12 apps that sit outside of these folders are the ones I’m using the most on a daily basis.

Page 2: One folder lives here. This is where the remaining entertainment and music apps live on my phone. There are five of them. YouTube, Medium, Amazon, Podcasts, and Spotify. That’s it. I like to keep these in a folder on page two because it requires more conscious thought to access them. I need to open my phone, swipe, click on the folder, then click an app in order to use it. I make it as hard as possible to access these.

Page 3: This page virtually never gets visited. All the iPhone apps that I never use are in a folder. If I ever need to use one of these, I usually am using the search function instead of swiping over to find them. The competitors folder is work related and has all the apps that are similar to the businesses I’ve helped build. I don’t use this very much either, but like to stay up to date on what other companies are doing.

This layout of apps took me quite a while to figure out and I am always tweaking it. It’s what I’ve found works best for me and it might look different than what you end up doing.

8. Replace deleted apps with quality content

I’m not totally off my phone. There are still those dead times in the day where I enjoy browsing something to take my mind off work. To fill the void of social media I use medium. Since you’re reading this, you’ve discovered medium too. It’s awesome. If I want to use my phone for entertainment, this is where I go.

9. Turn off Raise to Wake

When you pick your phone up and look at it, it automatically wakes up. I turned this off. If I pick up my phone and the screen turns on, I’m more inclined to open it up and do something. So now when I pick up my phone up, nothing happens unless I tap the screen to wake it up.

Go to:

Settings > Display & Brightness > Toggle Raise to Wake

And that’s it! This is the culmination of a lot of experimenting, but I finally feel like I’ve figured out how to best use my phone. I hope this was helpful to you and I wish you luck in finding a good solution for yourself. I’m happier, more present, and enjoying life much more since I’ve made these changes and I seriously encourage you to at least give some of them a try!