I tried many different life hacks for decreasing phone use in the past. Deleting social media apps, putting the phone color into black and white, the list goes on. None of it really worked. There was always a work around. Willpower alone wasn’t enough to overcome the social engineering that drives smartphone use. But recently, I have made serious changes to how I use my smartphone. It didn’t take any life hacks. I only had to radically reshape the way I see my digital life.
What Too Much Screens Do To Me
I can only speak from personal experience. When I use my phone too much, I can always tell fairly easily. My mind feels uneasy and I have a clear sense that I wasted precious time. There are way more important things that I can be doing with my time. Time is a zero sum game. Any time used for one purpose cannot be used for another. The realization that every minute that I spend on my phone is a minute that I’ll never be able to use for something more fulfilling stung. With this feeling in mind, I picked up a copy of Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (affiliate link). Yes, I know I just blogged about another one of his books recently (affiliate link). He writes good books that present practical ways to overcome some very common issues. Go check out his Core Ideas series on his YouTube channel to get a decent summary, but I digress. The contents of Digital Minimalism helped me to change how I see my phone.
The Digital Declutter
I don’t want to summarize the whole book. One of the major suggestions of the book is to complete a 30 day digital declutter (link to his YouTube video about digital minimalism). This is the process of removing all optional technology from your life for 30 days so that you can assess what parts of your digital life are aligned with what you value. The 30 days away from most technology gives you the mental room to figure out if you actually get value out of the digital habits that have accumulated. The hardest things for me to give up were watching YouTube videos, checking sports scores/news, and reading the personal finance blogs that I follow. Making this radical change is necessary. No half measures will prove to yourself that the changes to your digital habits are serious. Making it difficult is what makes the transformation possible.
The Difficult Beginning
I did my digital declutter back in April/May. For the first couple weeks that I put aside optional technology, it was difficult. I wanted to go use my phone when I was bored. I could feel that little pull in the back of my head to check on sports news or to watch something on YouTube. At that point, I was regularly using social media when I got bored. So the pull to go to those sites was pretty strong too. My goal was to completely change my relationship with technology. And I was mentally prepared for the difficulty of the first few weeks. This mental preparation was similar to how I would prepare for the rigors of varsity basketball practice back in high school. As long as you know it’s going to be hard, it’s easier to overcome. Like someone who trains for a race, I “trained” in the week leading up to the full digital declutter. I started to pull back from social media and my phone to make the process easier.
The Easier End
By the third week of the declutter, my mind was remarkably clear. Focusing became easier and my phone was much less of a temptation when I was bored. Throughout the declutter, I read three books and rediscovered my love of reading. My phone was less of a burden. It look much less of my time. Of course there were things that I still missed doing. There were certain activities, like scrolling social media, that I didn’t miss at all. One by one, I was able to reexamine my previous digital habits. With the extra separation from them, it made it easier to decide which habits could come back (with stricter limits) and which ones were gone for good.
That’s not to say that this was some sort of technology panacea. I haven’t ascended to a higher plane of consciousness because I stayed off YouTube for a month. But has my life actively improved because of it? Most definitely yes. When previously I spent an hour cumulatively on social media, now I only use it to share blog posts. My phone, while it can still be a distraction, is much less of a distraction as it used to be. I’m still working on a few other habits that I think will make a difference in my digital life, but for now I’ve made a great start. Through the digital declutter I’ve proven to myself that changing my relationship with technology is possible. And it’s something that improves my life.
Post Declutter Habits
Now that I’m on the other side of my digital declutter, there are additional habits that I want to bring in. I want that feeling of mental freedom from my phone and from the allure of the internet. Here are the two extra actions that help with this goal. The first is to make my phone less enticing. IPhones have this great content restriction feature embedded within the Screen Time function. If you turn on “Limit Adult Websites,” you can add websites to the restricted list. I added websites that I tend to waste time on, such as Youtube, ESPN, and others to the list of sites that my phone will block. Now if I want to access those websites on my phone, I have to go into Settings, go into Screen Time, go into Content & Privacy Restrictions, and then turn it off. By the time I get halfway through these steps, I typically think of something better to do.
The second habit is one that I’m still working on. You pick a spot in your living space where your phone will live. It’s a deliberate choice to treat your smart phone like a wall mounted phone. Ideally, the phone will live somewhere where you can’t reach it from the couch or the dinner table. You can turn the ringer on so that you know when you get calls. But when you need to use it- for calling, texting, or looking something up- you go to where the phone lives to do it. This changes the way that I see my phone. It’s more of a tool and less of a constant companion. The goal of this habit is to eliminate careless phone use. Using my phone to do a specific task while standing reduces the chances of me checking a dozen other sites and scrolling. I’m much more likely to do that if I’m lounging on the couch with my phone within reach.
Change = Consistency + Time
The 30 day digital declutter provided a jarring shock to my digital habits. Breaking the old digital regime gave space to a reformed online life based on utility. The digital declutter is a great start to living a more free life. But permanent change requires a consistent dedication to the new way of doing things. Another key to this process is to build on what works. I found that keeping my phone beyond my arm’s reach reduced my likelihood of aimless web surfing. Putting my phone is a specific spot means that I know where it is if I need it. But I’m not going to be distracted by it while I’m doing something else. The ability to focus on deeper things brings more satisfaction to my free time.
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