This is How to Reduce Phone Usage in 4 Easy Steps!

Back in the December 1900 edition of The Ladies Home Journal, author John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. wrote an article called “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.  In it, Watkins made a series of predictions of what may happen in the world in the year 2000.

He started the article by saying that “these prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible” but that he consulted the “most learned and conservative minds in America” to get their thoughts on 29 topics.

One of the predictions that came true was related to mobile phones:

“Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.” ²

I just wonder if they had any idea back then on how dependent we would be on these wireless telephones, so much so that some of us would be visiting a website called Google and typing in…how to reduce phone usage – which, as you know by now, is the subject of this blog post!

Overcoming Our Cell Phone Dependence

Many of us rely on our cell phones to add a ton of value to our lives by helping us: stay in touch with family and friends, find our way around town, and learn by using them to listen to audiobooks and podcasts – as well as many more things.  However, as indispensable as they have become, they have also become a major source of distraction.

However, as Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, points out:

“The good news is, being dependent is not the same thing as being addicted. We can get the best out of our devices without letting them get the best of us. By hacking back our phones, we can short-circuit the external triggers that spark harmful behaviors.” ¹

In one chapter of the book, Eyal introduces a 4-step process that we can use for how to reduce phone usage which will help save us countless hours of mindless time on our phones.

So, with that being said, let’s now review his 4Rs for how to reduce phone usage!

How to Reduce Phone Usage Using the 4 Rs

Oh, and by the way, the cool thing is that this whole 4-step process for how to reduce phone usage can be implemented in less than an hour from beginning to end.

Step 1: Remove

The first step for how to reduce phone usage is to get rid of the apps that you don’t use to unclutter your screen.

According to Eyal:

“To do so, I had to ask myself the critical question of which external triggers on my phone were serving me and which were not. Based on my, answers, I uninstalled apps that didn’t align with my values. I kept apps for learning and staying healthy and removed news apps with blaring alerts and stress-inducing headlines.” ¹

Make Step #1 actionable: Get rid of all of the apps that you don’t use by uninstalling them!

Step 2: Replace

Getting rid of apps you don’t use is easy as they don’t evoke an emotional reaction. The second step, however, is not so easy as it involves getting rid of the apps that you love.

The problem with many of the apps that you love is that they end up distracting you from the more important things you need to take care of.  For example, watching cat videos on YouTube when you plan to spend time with your child or chatting with friends on Facebook Messenger when you should be finishing that proposal for work.

Eyal came up with a solution to this that didn’t involve him completely abandoning these services, as he says:

“I found my solution by replacing when and where I used the problematic services. Since I’d set aside time for social media in my timeboxed schedule, there was no longer any need to have them on my phone. After a few minutes of hesitation, removing them from my phone felt like a breath of fresh air. I could breathe easy knowing I could still access these services on my computer and at a time I set aside, not whenever the app maker decided to ping me.” ¹

A quick note – when he says ‘timeboxed schedule’ he is referring to what we called time blocking in a previous post which is simply allocating chunks of time on your calendar to different tasks on your to-do list, then working uninterrupted on that task during that chunk of time.

Make Step #2 actionable: Shift where and how you utilize various distracting apps. For example, instead of checking out cat videos on your cell phone, schedule time for social media and other entertainment and view it on your desktop instead of your phone. Another suggestion he has is to get a wristwatch so you don’t have to check your phone for the time and possibly get tempted to pick it up.

Step 3: Rearrange

The third step that Eyal recommends is to rearrange the critical apps that are left to make our phone screens less cluttered and therefore less distracting.

To do this he recommends sorting your apps into three different categories: “Primary tools”, “Aspirations”, and “Slot Machines”.

“Primary tools” are apps that help you accomplish things on a frequent basis such as getting a ride via Uber, finding a location using Maps or Waze, adding an appointment on your calendar using the Calendar app, etc.  You should not have more than 5 or 6 of these types of apps.

“Aspirations” are apps that help you do things you want to spend time on such as meditation, working out, reading books, listening to podcasts, etc.

“Slot machines” are those apps that you get lost in after you open them such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

Once you have sorted the icons into these three categories, the advice he gives is to rearrange your home screen so that it only displays the “Primary” apps and “Aspirations”.  Those apps that are “Slot Machines” that trigger mindless checking on your part should be moved to another screen or deleted.

Make Step #3 actionable: Sort your apps into the 3 categories above and then move those “Slot Machines” that trigger mindless checking to another screen or delete them.

Step 4:  Reclaim

The last step is to adjust the notifications on your phone so that the app makers don’t interrupt you whenever they like.  This one is on us to modify these settings to suit our needs because the app makers sure as hell aren’t going to do it for us. They want to annoy us as much as possible to get us to use their apps as much as possible.

There are two kinds of notifications we will need to adjust and the actual “how” of doing it depends on the type of phone you have. Rest assured that it is easy to do, all you need to do is a quick Google search.

Sound – the first type of notification is also the most intrusive and that is the audible notification. The idea here is to ask yourself which type of sounds you will allow to interrupt you (i.e. phone calls or texts only) and then disable everything else.

Visual – the second type of notification is visual interruptions, so perhaps you only want to enable calendar reminders and disable everything else – that is a decision you are going to have to make on what’s best for you.

Make Step #4 actionable: Modify the sound and visual notification settings for each app that you have left and be selective on which ones can send you notifications.

Summing Up!

As you have seen there are a bunch of things that we can do to get rid of those unwanted external triggers on our phones for how to reduce phone usage.

Eyal concludes:

“As powerful as the app makers’ tricks may be, they are no match for removing, replacing, rearranging, and reclaiming the apps that don’t serve you. By taking a fraction of the time you would otherwise spend getting distracted by your phone, you can customize it to eliminate unhelpful external triggers. A distraction-free mobile experience is well within your grasp. There’s no reason you can’t hack back.” ¹

Speaking of Predictions…

Back in 2007, which was 8 years before the first iPhone was released, science fiction writer David Gerrold was asked to write a column in a magazine that is now defunct called Sm@rt Reseller on the future of computing, as he said back then:

“Sometime in the next few years, all of those devices are going to meld into one. It will be a box less than an inch thick and smaller than a deck of cards. (The size will be determined by what’s convenient to hold, not by the technology inside.) The box will have a high-res color screen, a microphone, a plug for a headset or earphones, a camera lens, wireless connectivity, a cellphone and beeper functions, a television and radio receiver, a digital recorder, and it will have enough processing power and memory to function as a desktop system.” ³

More impressively, he went on to say:

“I call this device a Personal Information Telecommunications Agent, or Pita for short. The acronym also can stand for Pain In The Ass, which it is equally likely to be, because having all that connectivity is going to destroy what’s left of everyone’s privacy.” ³

And on that note, speaking of pita’s, it’s time for me to get outta here and go get hummused!

Until next time, use the tips above for how to reduce cell phone usage, and as always…PYMFP!
–Rick

Use it Or Lose It – How to Reduce Phone Usage

The 4-step process for how to reduce phone usage that we discussed above is:

1:  Remove
2:  Replace
3:   Rearrange
4:  Reclaim

When to Use It

Use these 4 steps for how to reduce phone usage when you want to spend less time on your phone.

What Do You Think?

What do you think of the 4-step process above for how to reduce phone usage to spend less time on your phone? Will you use it? Do you have any other tips? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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References

¹ Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal

² http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf

³ https://twitter.com/estherschindler/status/979005249452232704