Kicking my phone addiction 📵
How I 📉 reduced my screen time and 📈 increased my productivity ⚡️ lifetothemax no.17 ⚡️
I spend a looooooot of time on my phone. It’s not uncommon for me to have a daily screentime of eight hours or more. Four hours on TikTok, maybe one or two on Youtube, sprinkle in an hour of Twitter, some LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram to see what friends are up to, add a few hours of mind-numbing mobile games, and you’ve got a whole lot of wasted time.
8 hours per day x 365 days per year = 2920 hours per year = 121 days per year. There goes a third of the year. Add to that the same amount for sleeping, and again for work, and that leaves approximately, let me think… zero time for anything else. That’s not good.
All this wasted time stops me from doing other, more productive things. Most importantly, it goes directly against one of my ten goals for 2021: consume less, create more.
So I have to kick this bad habit/addiction. Or rather, I had to. Luckily, those 8 hours a day were the worst of it, and I have since reduced my phone time considerably. Now, at this point, this story has been told hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways. But this week’s newsletter is just going to be about my own experience: how I identified the problem, what my solutions were, and finally the results.
It took me a very long time to make a change. Why did it take me so long?
I liked it: “I enjoy using my phone. How can that be so bad?”
I didn’t think it was a big deal: “I know it’s a lot of time, but what am I going to do instead anyway?”
Bad habits die hard: “I’ve tried stopping, but I just like it too much. Why should I bother trying to stop anyway?”
Clearly, I had a problem, and the first thing I had to do was realize I had a problem. Somehow, it wasn’t the numbers that scared me. I had been aware of them, but the real shock came as a sudden realization.
Here’s what happened: I went to the bathroom and, like I always do, while sitting on the toilet, I pulled out TikTok. I just started scrolling. And then I just kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. When I finally got up, 45 minutes had gone by. It felt like waking up from hypnosis. In that moment, a flash of anxiety went through my head. I thought, “If I could so easily check out on life, literally sitting on the toilet, how am I ever going to do anything with my life?” As fun as those 45 minutes of TikTok were, was it worth wasting my life away for quality content?
This feeling was given a name when I watched a video sent to me by my friend Cesar after last week’s newsletter (🗣 Shoutout Cesar!). In his video on “Illusions of Time”, Michael from Vsauce discusses the common idea of how our perception of time differs in the moment vs. looking back (prospectively/retrospectively). A boring day may feel long in the moment, but you won’t remember much from it, making it seem short when you look back at it in the future. In comparison, an exciting day will go by very fast, but you will remember doing lots and therefore it will feel long retrospectively. He refers to this phenomenon as the long/short, short/long pattern of time.
Later, however, he discusses that in recent years, specifically since the advent of technologies such as TV, a new “short/short” pattern has appeared, in which time flies by, yet it is not remembered as a significant moment and therefore is also remembered as a short time. When I heard this after having had that experience with TikTok, where time flew by yet I wasn’t doing anything of value, a lightbulb went off in my head. Until then, I couldn’t really understand why TikTok and other phone apps were really that destructive. After all, they made me happy, why stop? The answer: as happy as they make me, it is not long-term, memorable happiness, but instantaneous and momentary happiness. It is happiness that leaves me unsatisfied and wanting more, causing me to go back for even more TikTok.
Needless to say, I knew I needed to change something. The goal was to reduce my overall time spent on my phone and make sure that the time that I do spend on my phone is time doing stuff that will have a positive, long-term effect on me. Watching that thirty-minute Vsauce video taught me something, and allowed me to create a better newsletter. It was a consumption that enabled better creation, unlike those 45 minutes I spent on TikTok.
So this was my solution:
I turned off notifications for all apps other than messaging apps. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’ve probably at least heard of the now-infamous Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.” A big takeaway from that documentary is that apps, specifically their notifications, have been engineered to enforce a usage pattern. Essentially, as an app user, you are no longer choosing when to pick up your phone and open the app. Instead, the app is telling you, “Hey, open me now!” by saying things like, “X liked your photo” or “Y viewed your profile.”
Luckily, the solution is quite clear: turn off your notifications. I’ve turned off notifications on all apps other than messaging apps. I now only get notifications if they were specifically caused by a person trying to contact me. In itself, this has had a profound effect.
But this only solves one trigger: notifications. From my personal behavior, I know I don’t only open apps when I receive a notification. Anytime I’m bored, I also invariably check Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and play games. So how did I solve this?
I deleted every social media and/or content app off my phone. That means Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are gone, TikTok and YouTube are gone, and all of my dumb games are gone. Now, when I subconsciously pick up my phone to distract myself from whatever I’m currently doing, I’m confronted with a pretty empty home screen. This doesn’t mean I can’t consult all of the above through Safari, but that requires me to open the app, start typing the URL and finally press enter, all of which are key additional steps during which I can hopefully come to and stop the destructive process. This, as well, has so far worked pretty well.
One additional note: since the companies that release these apps so desperately want you to download their apps, they often don’t put in as much time making their mobile websites nice to use, and they end up losing a lot of the addictiveness that is built into the apps. I dare you to watch Instagram Stories on your phone’s web browser for more than a few minutes, it’s really terrible. This means that I can check Instagram to like my girlfriend’s Instagrams, and watch the stories of the roughly ten people whose stories I care about, but the experience of using the app is so displeasing that going further than that is more of a chore than anything else. If you’re addicted to Instagram, try this! It will work.
Finally, I set 1-5 minute time limits on all these websites through the “Screen Time” feature of my phone. This adds one additional step before I can finally use these platforms, one additional time where I can ask myself, “Is this really the best use of my time right now?”
These may seem very extreme, but they work. The day after I implemented these is the day I posted my first newsletter in a month. Not because I had a burst of motivation, not because I had a great idea I desperately wanted to write about, but simply because I literally got bored. Boredom is a great motivator, as long as you don’t have thousands of carefully manufactured attention grabbers coming at you through your phone.
The numbers speak for themselves. Here’s this week’s average:
Down to only 2 hours and 51 minutes a day! I still have some way to go, but this is truly something. The results are there: down from 8+ hours to under 3 hours. And just because I have the data, here’s also the breakdown of that screentime:
As expected, Safari is at the top, and we can see that two messaging apps are in the top four. Youtube is third (at 1h37, including the 30 minutes for the Vsauce video), and then Twitter and Instagram. This seems to match what I set out to achieve. Ideally, the messaging apps would be at the top (as I increasingly use my phone as just that: a phone) and maybe I can further reduce the other apps by trying new methods (maybe restricting myself to only check them on my computer, which I don’t carry in my pocket everywhere I go?).
Now, one more question comes up: what about if I want to use these platforms for “creating” and not “consuming”? After all, creating TikToks is one of my goals for 2021, how can I do that if I don’t have TikTok on my phone? In theory, the answer is easy: download the app, post, delete the app. As I start creating TikToks again, I will attempt this. I don’t want this to cause me to relapse, but I am hoping that the fact I am writing this here, now, will make me think twice before I waste hours of my life on TikTok again.
Of course, these techniques will not work for everyone, and not everyone needs such a drastic approach. Most likely, you already don’t spend too much time on your phone, so deleting these apps is an unnecessary hassle. But if you do, maybe some of these techniques will help you break the negative habit loop.
There are still a few things I need to work on:
My screen time is probably still shocking to many of you, even though it is way down from my worst. How can I reduce it even more?
How can I really reverse engineer my phone habit loop to replace it with another habit? For example, I’ve caught myself grabbing my phone on long car rides as soon as there is a lull in the conversation. (Note: I am not driving when I “grab my phone”, since I don’t have a license 😅. Just thought I would clarify.) How can I get used to silence and just looking out the window again, like I always did and enjoyed growing up?
As I work on building out a strategy for posting on TikTok, how do I ensure I don’t “relapse”.
Phones, at the end of the day, are tools. They should be that. Even if that tool is just used to check what someone tweeted, that is still a tool. But as soon as that “tool” becomes negative, that needs to be fixed.
If you also spend too much time on your phone, I’m sure you’ll find something of interest in this, but I’d also love to hear how you’ve tried to reduce your screen time. This is still a work in progress for me, and I still have not gotten my screen time as low as I’d like. Any suggestions welcome:
💪 Goals
Since my newsletter has, in recent weeks, been less specifically focused on the progress towards my goals, I thought I would make that aspect of my previous newsletters into a subsection of my newsletter called “Goals”. This will also absorb the previous “Statistics” section, which I will now be breaking down into two categories: input and output goals. I can’t remember where I first read about this concept, but this article describes the difference between the two pretty well: Input Goals vs Output Goals. Basically, input goals are defined by effort (“work out once a week”) whereas output goals by the result of this effort (“get abs”). It seems clear that I should keep track of which goals are which, and adapt accordingly.
Year progress: 43%
I’m still doing great on the newsletter, reading, and working out. This week, I finished my twelfth book of the year, “The Compound Effect”, an amazing book! Really enjoyed it. I also did two arm workouts, biked 15 miles, and paddle-boarded: 4 workouts! In one week! Wow! Still have not posted again on TikTok, so need to work on that. But I think I am getting a good idea of a strategy to go forward with this. Will discuss this in a future newsletter.
📥 Input
Newsletters posted: 17 📈 +1
Hours read this year: 78 📈 +4 (on schedule)
Workouts this year: 32 📈 +4 (10 ahead of target)
TikToks posted in 2021: 9 +0 (13 behind target)
📤 Output
Newsletter subscribers: 38 (thank you ❤️)
Books read this year: 12
Number of abs: 1
TikTok followers: 122
📚 Reading
Finished this week:
“The Compound Effect”, Darren Hardy.
Currently reading:
“The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien.
“Blink”, Malcolm Gladwell.
Please leave any book recommendations in the comments and add me on Goodreads.
Thank you once again for reading this newsletter. It really does mean a lot. Thanks to all the new arrivals who have subscribed since last time. I’ve enjoyed sharing these on social media and getting new eyes on the newsletter. It is interesting writing for a larger audience than just my close friends. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so now:
If you found this interesting, you can also consider sharing:
Thank you again, and as always, see you next Sunday ❤️
In the meantime, you can read last week’s newsletter:
We need to talk. Love, Mom
Yay