Minimize Your Phone and Decrease Your Screen Time

Introduction

What Do You Want Your Phone To Do?

I think that in order to find balance, we can try walking on both sides of the seesaw. If you’re confused about how much you should optimally use your phone – probably because you’ve identified an excessive amount of screen time – try using it less than you think is optimal. In this way, you will experiment in which situations and to which means the phone is useful. When I tried this balancing act, I realized that it may not be optimal to have my phone immediately accessible at my workspace, but that it makes sense to bring it when I’m away from home. I also experienced the feeling of wanting to reach for the phone due to habituation, versus intentionally picking up the phone for productive purposes.

Decreasing Screen Time

If we want to decrease our screen time, we must first know what we’re working with. The screen time trackers built into the settings, or through a third-party app, can give you a detailed insight into how long the screen is awake, and the apps it displays. Going through this data can allow us to reflect on which apps we might overuse, and how much of the time we spend on our phones is actually useful. Zero screen time wouldn’t be productive for me, because then I wouldn’t be able to create content and do a lot of the work I do. But the multiple hours of YouTube and Instagram that I’ve had on certain days in the past exceeds “creating content”, and it’s more time than I need to view the posts I might want to see for inspirational, educational or entertainment purposes.

When we have measured a baseline of phone usage, here are some of the tricks I’ve used to limit it. I have successfully tried all these methods at one point, and I still utilize some of them.

  • Use a grayscale filter. It looks like a lot of phones have inbuilt settings to turn your screen black and white, and maybe with a quick toggle so that you can easily turn it on or off. Why would this be useful? Think about it; these tech and media companies are not stupid. They’ve intentionally designed their products in a way to make them maximally appealing, and therefore maximally addictive. If a major visual element of that experience – the colors – goes away, you’re left with a panel that you’re not really used to look and interact with. Being void of colors, the experience will be comparatively dull. The Instagram feed will look like an old newspaper, and it will take some extra thinking to navigate through your phone properly. Aside from the experience being less stimulating, the gray-scaled screen can also act as a reminder to be mindful of your screen time. When you’re greeted with a black-and-white screen, you might stop for a moment to ask yourself if there is an intentional action you want to perform, or if you just seek comfort and pleasure.
  • Re-arranging apps on your phone can counter some of the habituated routines of mindlessly going through a set of apps. When I had my social media apps neatly organized in a folder on my home screen, convenient and easily accessible, I could just mindlessly open them. I then switched to having the apps scattered in the app drawer, and now most of them are only accessible through a search. This resistance makes the use more intentional, so when an app becomes addictive, try switching its place. Perhaps you’ll find yourself clicking on the spot where it used to be, and catching yourself performing an automated behavior. Then you’ll proceed to make a more conscious decision about if you should actually open the app.
  • Set up no-phone zones, and similar rules. We are habitual creatures, so if we repeat certain behavior at a certain place, a certain time, or when we’re hit with a certain feeling, these cues can develop into triggers for this behavior. To counter this, we can set certain limitations for certain cues. Perhaps you don’t use your phone before a certain time of the day, perhaps you don’t use your phone at the dinner table, or perhaps you don’t open social media apps in school or at the job.
  • Play around with the notification settings. It’s not obvious which notifications actually make you check your phone less vs. more. I found that disabling the “someone liked your post” notifications on my social media decreased my screen time, but disabling message notifications on social media had the opposite effect, because I’d constantly check the apps to see if I’d received any replies in conversations. I also disabled all notifications from games, as I don’t need to know when my dragons are ready for a raid. Just like managing mails in your inbox, you’ll eventually figure out which notifications you find yourself constantly swiping away.
  • Have other things to do. If I don’t have short-term goals and tasks, this makes me much more prone to stay on my phone. Reversely, I know that if a lot is demanded from me, often socially and professionally, I’m often able to rise to the occasion and perform many of the routines and tasks I’d ideally do without this external pressure. This is for me the biggest contributing factor to when my screen time dips. It seems that a solution to not wasting time is to not have much time to waste; to have obligations and meaningful activities to do instead.
  • Be aware that phone usage can be a symptom of a problem, and not necessarily the problem itself. Therefore, be careful not to replace screen time with something else that’s unproductive. Ask yourself why you want to decrease your phone usage. What is your phone stopping you from doing? What adventures could be better lived with less technology?

Outro

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