Trying to hack phone distraction
How to stop wasting time on your phone
Anyone who’s met me will know that I’m quite into my tech. On the other hand, if there’s one thing I hate more than anything, it’s finding myself in bed two hours after my alarm’s gone off, scrolling through my phone. This post is all about the different ways I’ve tried to get the most out of my phone, without letting it turn into a time-sucking black-hole.
Assessing the damage
First thing’s first — before you jump into denial about how you don’t have a problem I suggest you go and download an app called Moment. Moment tracks the time you spend on your phone and lets you know how much time you’re throwing down the drain. There’s also a pro upgrade that lets you send reminders and schedule in screen-free time for extra phone-blocking power.
Try to estimate how much time you spend on your phone each day and my guess is that you’ll be off by half. Apparently the average amount is 5 hours a day. I was easily hitting 2.5 hours of screen time when I started using Moment but (on most days) I have got my use down by about an hour.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” — Peter Drucker
Giving yourself a goal to work towards and just realising just how much time you spend on your phone is going to guarantee that you make at least some changes to your behaviour. Try shaving off just 15 minutes a day for a week and see what happens.
Organising your home screen
At last count, I had 230 different apps on my phone, but if you were to unlock it you’d see only 3 and a half rows of them. Too often you just go on your phone for the sake of it, see a shiny app icon and 30 minutes later you’re on Buzzfeed taking a quiz to determine whether or not your boyfriend is a racoon. This is why, on my phone, Facebook is six swipes and a folder away from the log-in screen. The trick is to search, not to tap. You still have all the apps you had before but just by rearranging them you cut distractions down to a minimum.
Everything on your home-screen should be task-orientated. You should be doing something with each of these apps — quickly writing a note, setting a reminder, making a calendar event. The home-screen is for input, not output. Leave Instagram in a folder where it can’t hurt you.
Notifications
This is probably the most important section of the three. As much as I tried conditioning myself to be immune to them, notifications are just inherently disruptive. The whole point of a notification is to draw your attention away from something so cutting out as many as you can should be your number one priority for happy phone usage. Following these rules will help you achieve this:
Notification Rules
- Schedule Do Not Disturb mode for whenever you want to be most productive — For me this means that it’s turned on everyday from 11pm until noon the next day. Don’t have it on just when you’re asleep.
- No email — Emails are never important enough to demand you attention immediately. Leave it until you get back to your computer.
- No adverts — No Depop, I do not want to see what your ‘Crazy-November’ sale has to offer me.
- Only have badge app icons turned on if you actually need to act on something — On my phone that means that I have them turned on for (some) messaging apps, Omnifocus, Todoist, Drafts, and Trello. That’s it.
- If in doubt, turn it off.
Above all, the thing to remember is, if someone really needs to get hold of you, they will call you.
Closing thoughts
There’s a whole host of other tips I could probably fire at you, but if I had to sum up my advice in a few words it would be this: remember that your phone is a tool. Ultimately, it’s there to help you do what you want to do.
Pick a Saturday or Sunday to forgo technology and see how much you actually need your phone. It will probably be a bit painful but when the next day comes, hopefully you’ll feel a little freer as a result.
