How to use your phone less

In an age of technology where its actually encouraged that you should always be on, on social media on a call with clients, on messaging platforms, on zoom calls on and on... it can become quite overwhelming and feel like your phone is taking over your life....

We have developed an unhealthy addiction to our phones and the instant gratification we get from the message tone and scrolling endlessly on the latest and greatest social media platform, in fear of missing out we run to become part of the mod and spend our time creating content we are generally not even proud of to impress people we don't even know...

That got a little dark... and phones are't all that bad, they are tools and  we use them is purely up to us. They can be used for building your own successful business which a couple years back would be unthinkable that you could crate and manage an entire business all from something that can fit in your pocket...

So now that we have establish that phones themselves are not the real problem how to we stop ourselves fro letting them take too much of our time?

In this blog post I want to share with you some Ideas that I have been using over the past two weeks to drastically cut down on the time I spend on senseless scrolling and my phone and my phone use in general...

Firstly and this will be different for everyone, you need to take time to audit your phone usage and see what you spend most of your time on, what is it you need and want to cut down on using. This isn't a difficult exercise as everyones phones measure what apps you use and how often, you can search on your phones settings and you should easily be able to find it, you might be a little shocked as was I at just how much time you spend or waste using your phone.  This may even shock you into realising how drastically you need to take stock of how you use your time on your phone from now on, I know i did.

Once you have identified your phone usage goals and where you want to minimise your phone usage in general, it is time to put a system in place to help you achieve that goal.

Goals are there to give us our “end point” and the direction we need to go in, from there we need to create a system that gives us the hoe, where, when etc, and the strategic plan of how to achieve said goal.

Your goal may look something like this: decrease usage of "insert new social media here" by 40% over the next month, or unlock your phone 20 less times over the next 2 weeks. You get the point, it needs to be specific and also measurable, otherwise you won't see the progress and you won't feel motivated to continue your phone less life.

Now here are some ideas and tips on how you can use the same piece of technology to your advantage, and thus allowing you to implement your strategy much easier than simply leaving the new habit you want to form to purely will power. The people with the most will power are those we do not need to use it often and rely on their system to help them stay disciplined.

James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits (a must read by the way) disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self control, in other words they spend less time in tempting situations.

This is why we are going to put these systems in place and leverage technology to help us use it less.

First, open your phone and search for (Digital Wellbeing & parental controls on android and Screen Time on Iphone respectively). In there you can set limits for your app usage. This will allow you to only use the app you choose to put a limit on for the amount of time you set. Very straight forward.

You should also be able to see on these settings how many times you unlock your phone every day. The average phone user unlocks their phone 150 times a day. This is obviously an estimated number and will be unique to everyone. That being said that is only unlocking and does not count the times you tap or swipe the screen just to see messages on your phone.

You can then in these settings set yourself a goal for how many times a day you want to unlock your phone and in this way, “gamify” how you approach being more mindful about your tech usage.

You can try and see what is the minimum times a day you can unlock your phone. I have personally done this and it feels good to beat my goal not unlocking my phone over 50 times a day, and you feel like you have the power back and that you aren't driven by technology but that you are in control. This obviously again does not include taps on my home screen and i am very guilty of that and working on that still.

If you need to focus on an important task like work for instance, switch on your phones, focus mode, or do not disturb mode or even take your phone out of the room completely. If you really struggle with this you may want to give your phone to someone you trust for the time you want to be undisturbed.

If you need to post daily on social media or if you work on social media, I get it, I am a digital marketer, it is literally my job to be using these platforms, but we can still be intentional and wise in how often we use it. Batch create your content and schedule it using Facebook scheduler, or Hootsuite etc.

This may seem like a bad idea to some and you may start thinking of  all the worst case scenarios that could happen if you don't have your phone with you at all times like, what if there is an emergency? and in most cases the things that constitute an emergency to us tend to resolve themselves over the course of 24hrs with or without your help. There are of course exceptions like always, if you have someone you love in the hospital i would recommend holding off this exercise till they are out of hospital.

Theres a quote from Seneca the stoic which goes like this: "We tend to suffer more in imagination than we ever do in reality”, and this quote is true of the “emergency excuses” we tell ourselves to keep our phones on us at all times.

Some tips for laptop usage on how to use social media less:  limit yourself to using it for 30 mins or whatever amount of time you need. Do not use your laptop or PC as an escape goat for replacing your phone usage, the idea is not to transfer the device usage but to limit it.

Download and install chrome extensions like facebook newsfeed killer that eliminates the newsfeed feature of facebook on your pc so you are not tempted to scroll. If something is important in your friends lives you will hear about it from them.

There are obviously many more hack we can add to make our lives less technology driven but by now I think you get the general idea.

So to sum up, decide where you want to start, create a plan of action, use technology to leverage your usage of it, and make the process of using technology less, fun. Keep on refining and bettering the process to ensure you use less willpower to resist using your phone and when you do use your phone that you are intentional about it.

Phones are again not the problem, it is our obsession and fear of missing out. As our good friend Garyvee says "social media is not the problem, it is the proxy" we then make it our problem by using it incorrectly and getting too emotionally involved with it.

Using these tips will hopefully help you in taking back the power and living a more fulfilled and productive life.