How to cut down on your phone usage.
Staying away from your phone can be a daunting task. It's front and centre in nearly every part of modern life. Pledging to reduce the time you spend staring at your phone isn't easy, despite how beneficial it may be.
But don't fret! When you fully commit to this, you can adopt sustainable and healthy habits to cut back on your phone. Here are a few tips on how you can cut your smartphone usage in half.
1. Keep yourself on a schedule
Keeping yourself on a daily schedule is one of the essential steps to weaning yourself off your phone. It is as easy as setting alarms and specifying how often you can check it. Start with every 15 minutes, then move to every half hour, every 45 minutes, or every hour. When your alarm goes off, spend one minute going through any notifications and then reset the timer. To reduce your response anxiety and hold yourself accountable for your screen time, you can try to inform your family and friends that you will not be responding within a certain timeframe.
2. Turn off as many push notifications as possible
Believe it or not but you do not have to be interrupted by every app on your phone. An easy way to reduce distractions is to turn off as many push notifications for as many apps as you can. To change your push notifications, you can head to the settings option on your phone and select the notifications option to control your preferences. Be sure to choose the apps you do not necessarily use so that the notifications only pop up while these specific apps are in use.
3. Take distracting apps off your home screen
Phone usage is correlated with unconscious behaviour since you unconsciously switch between different platforms. But, if you specifically seek out an app to use, you will cut down on the “accidental” time-sucks that happen when you start to tap around on your phone. To avoid this, try to keep the apps that you find encouraging, like an app for reading or learning. However, when you fully want to avoid time-consuming apps, it would be a good idea to delete all apps on your home screen that you want to limit your time on.
4. Try turning on your phone’s grayscale
One of the most jarring ways to curb the time you spend on your smartphone is to make its screen less desirable to view. Changing your phone to grayscale mode does exactly that. Removing the feeling of the “shiny rewards” that colourful icons offer you when you unlock your device helps you effectively spend less time on time-consuming apps. You can try to turn on the grayscale function by digging around in the Accessibility category on your device's settings. On an iPhone, you can try to find the Display Accommodations option and then turn on the Colour Filters. On a Samsung device, you can try to find the Vision option and then scroll down to Grayscale. It's as simple as that!
5. Kick your device out of bed
Try not to let your phone be the last thing you see at night and the first thing you check in the morning. Although it might be tempting, it is quite bad for you. You can resolve this problem by using a regular alarm clock or charging your phone out of reach, so you won’t be tempted to start your day off by getting vortexed into an avalanche of messages, updates and social media apps.