However, suggesting this to friends (and myself) I see two things that undermines the process, that the metric used here does not catch.
1. Usage over a long time span is usually not a "decline" but a "wave-like" pattern. aka rebound, or substitution. You remove one distracting app, stay productive for a week or a month, then rebound to same or another app. Repeat process.
2. Substitution through other media. As this one said, "use laptop/PC for mindfully using Social Media", this sounds really good, but in practise usually given time, returns to mindless browsing. That's how we work, our brain constantly tries to push things we have to do mindfully to an automated "mindless" process. The tricky thing with this is that, we usually don't consider the process "mindless" until long after it have become an mindless process.
It would be interesting, if you can observe your usage pattern over longer time-span. Not just Smartphone but also your PC/Laptop and observe if you truly have reduced your "distraction" time.
I did observe myself trying to reach for social media sites, refreshing pages, etc even with browser closed. I was able to change that and now take breaks more often. But yeah, like you mention, the challenge is to see if I can sustain the habit for longer period. I can already see some change in behavior around switch on/off time to catch up as much as possible.
(Noprocrast setting, here I come !)
You have a setback and return to mindless browsing. Don't drop it all. Note it mentally, review how it happened, make any necessary adjustments, forgive yourself and get back on track.
Some weeks will be total trainwrecks, but the key is to get back on the track, back onto your long-term game plan ASAP.
Gradually, your behaviors will shift with this persistence.
A slightly more fool-proof approach is to try to do a introspection on "how" and what part of the distraction you are coming back for, and gradually remove these.
For example, I had problem with Facebook long time ago. I tried to delete it from phone, block news-feed on browser with extension, but still couldn't get rid of it entirely. After a bit of introspection, I realized checking facebook is actually not a problem at all, getting stuck on it was. So, I took my time to analyze what part of facebook did steal my attention. I pin-pointed it down to a couple of news pages, group & liked pages, and about 90% of my friends posts. So I blocked all the news pages, groups & linked pages, unfollowed 90% of my friends.
I still check facebook, but each time I check it, its about 20-30 sec MAX, and since the content is 99% boring or insignificant, it doesn't steal my attention at all. When facebook became this to me, deleting it (and NOT re-installing) from the phone became a very painless process.
Hacker News is my new hit though.
The real "cure" is just mindfully deciding not to open "unproductive" apps and sites. Otherwise, my time-wasting workflow (hah) just naturally adapts after a while.
I wonder how you could get around this? Maybe a huge blacklist and deliberately messing with sites randomly to the point it become too much of an issue, e.g. making sites load very slowly; breaking css, images randomly, etc. Something like netflix's chaos monkey?
- When I moved to the Iphone X, I stopped using it so much, because it is just annoyingly large. It is awkward to use, so it doesn't come out.
- I do not use anything from the "social media" surveillance outfits, so have never had that clawing at me.
- And after setting up somewhat paranoid monitoring on my home network, I became aware of just how gossipy some apps I naively trusted are, and deleted them. (If you share data with anything not needed for function, or with any of the surveillance shops, I will not use your app.) That cut almost all the time-wasters.
At home, which is where I am now almost all the time thanks to the plague, it lives on a table, like phones used to. When it begs for attention, feeding it becomes something I do when I get up to stretch or get coffee instead of being a reflex.
[1] Disregarding bad actors who force you to use a phone app
They'll be able to run iOS apps natively, so I think that may indirectly help the bad actor situation.
You'd actually easily be able to use either an old iPhone or something completely different and still be able to use an app when a company requires it.
Instead when I've got a call the LED blinks and people know I'll call them back once I've got the time and notice it.
For messages (whatsapp, mail, whatever) I generally only catch up on them once a day.
I don't know how other people can tolerate allowing others to annoy them whenever they feel like it, or deal with the incessant notification noises.
Especially software developers, mathematicians, etc. How do they have time to think and focus when they're interrupted every few minutes?
For communication, async is the key. For mindless entertainment, cut off any way said entertainment has of interrupting you. Even Android allows you to turn off notifications now...
I thought about this question a lot, in the end I think it's a classic "But what if the worst case happens"-situation, and that my mom and I both are right in our own ways.
What do you think, HN?
Or many, many "mom emergencies" that are not emergencies at all, but that she feels are.
If you're using an iPhone, you can change the Ringtone and Vibration settings for individual contacts. The setting is called Emergency Bypass[1], and it's at the very top when you enter the ringtone/vibration selection screens when editing a contact. It'll bypass both Do Not Disturb mode as well as Silent Mode. I wouldn't recommend using it for the ringtone because then literally every text/call will always ring, but turning it on for vibration may reassure your mom that she can reach you when she's in need.
I'm notorious for putting my phone on silent temporarily and accidentally leaving it like that for days at a time, and I ended up doing that for my mother. She knows how much my phone drives me crazy, and when I let her know I did that for her, her reaction told me it was more meaningful to her than pretty much any bday or Mother's Day gift I've ever given her.
I very quickly turned it off for the ringtone, because the novelty of it made initially overwhelm me with a constant stream of random messages and calls (which subsided after a while). But left it on for vibrate. Although I haven't mentioned that update to her...
[1] https://www.imore.com/how-receive-messages-specific-contacts...
Mine's got a setting where it rings normally when someone calls me 3 (or was it 2?) times in a row. So in an emergency just keep trying.
I'm hoping this cures me of using the phone to fill every tiny moment of downtime.
I do still bring my phone around though, mostly for the camera.
There are some things that are infuriating about the watch though, when it feels as if what I want to do is artificially constrained by the software. Why can't I copy and paste a link to send in a message? Why can't I simply read a podcast description? Why do podcasts refresh seemingly at random?
Other than a few niggling frustrations, I'm extremely happy with the watch.
Yes, we are still waiting on iWatch’es with LTE enabled...
I do a number of things the OP does to try to curb "wasted" time. I would add the following:
I have no social media on my phone and the only game is: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
Really hard to get addicted to but enjoyable enough if I actually want to spend a few minutes playing a game.
I use this on my desktop: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/intention/ Anytime I notice a website that I habitually load (mindless) I add it to the list. Then I get a pop up asking me how much time I want to spend and showing how much I've already spent. Surprisingly effective.
I would also challenge the assumption that screen time is automatically "wasted". A lot of the time I spent on the phone yesterday was reading wikipedia or a book. This time was enriching. I also spent a lot of time refreshing politico. That was not enriching. Oh well.
I'm trying to recognize when I'm feeling the need to waste time and choose a healthier activity. Stepping away from the computer to stretch, take the dogs out, etc. Usually if I'm procrastinating there is a physical or emotional need that I should be addressing. Mindlessly reading HN (or whatever) is just a distraction from what my body is trying to tell me.
Every morning I empty my bowels while playing Filling. Or the occasional Range or Light Up.
So much appreciate that these got an Android build. Installed on every phone I've ever had.
I added a few back in over time by using the VIP feature of mail, since I have a few colleagues whose emails I never want to miss. But overall, it is up to me when I check on things on my phone. Negative consequences have been nil and positive consequences have been many. Can’t recommend it enough.
Aside: Caught the typo "step sis" towards the end of the article. Little Freudian slip. ;)
I would highly recommend it.
For comparison, in the past week, I'm just over 7 hours of use, with 5:45 in Messenger, and most of the rest split between mail and the camera. I suspect messenger is only so high because I leave it running and unlocked during conversations. Every notification (18 per day, 126 total) was a text message or a phone call.
Ideally switch go Graphene OS if your phone supports it.
Or you could just not have any icons on the home screen at all.
Use T-UI instead:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ohi.andre.consolelauncher/
I actually find it much easier to use than the icons. I just type a few characters, sometimes just one, usually only two or three and T-UI finds the app for me.
1. All banner notifications are turned off (this might change if you can swipe up to temporarily hide them like on Android).
1. Only a couple of important messaging apps (SMS, Signal) give me real notifications: the phone vibrates and they appear (hidden) on the lock screen.
2. Other messages like Slack and get delivered to the notification center, but can't appear on the lock screen.
3. Notifications that I need to eventually respond to are set to badge only. The badge count annoys me so I eventually look at it, but notifications that I'm intentionally delaying don't busy up the notification center.
I've found that this only somewhat works and also drives a new behavior. Previously I wouldn't check my phone unless I was bored and wanted to read something like Twitter or Hacker News. Now, however, I'm grabbing my phone often to see if I had quiet notifications delivered.
In some ways this is worse than just letting the phone buzz. The mental distraction from thinking "I have have a Slack message" seems to loom more than the knowledge that something came in that I'm ignoring in order to focus.
Disable notifications for most everything. Delete social media apps and mindfully using them on the laptop/desktop instead.
