Screen time – the weekly notification that reminds you of how much time you’ve wasted. We’ve all tried to reduce it at some point in our life, but it never seems to last. This post follows the different methods I’ve used in trying to increase productivity by changing the way I use my phone.
Greyscale.
Throughout October, I opted to make my phone display greyscale after some reading, seeing as my screen time managed to creep around 7 hours almost every day.
One of the main reasons I opted for the black and white approach was due to the apps I frequently use. It became habit to open Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat as soon as I saw the icons, regardless of there being any notifications present.
Removing the colour made the icons stand out less, and for the first week I noticed a significant drop to 4 hours screen time per day. However, one day stuck at home due to rain left me staring at a screen all day, and the habit to open apps reappeared.
App limits.
There’s not a lot to say on using app limits to restrict the time spent using my phone. It created the same response as an alarm, with the instant response to hit a button and continue with whatever you were doing.
They didn’t work for the weeks I used them for, and I moved to the next idea in my list.
Notifications off.
My next thought was to turn off notifications for anything other than texts, calls and tweets from users that I use as a source of news. As time moved on I found this helped a lot more than a lack of colour, and reduced the urge to check my phone if I knew there was nothing ‘useful’ for me to look at.
I caught myself replacing the time spent on social media to playing games, knowing that there were things I wanted to research and learn about with this time. The only problem was I couldn’t find the strength to delete these games and the progress I’d made, and was taunted by the icons sitting on the home screen – creating the same issue I’d started with, but in a different place.
Changing device.
Skip to the last week of November. I’ve got a new phone and as most people have probably experienced, this brings a boost in the amount of time spent using it.
Weirdly this wasn’t the case for me, and the act of getting a new device has reduced the amount of time I spend staring at screens everyday. I’m convinced purely by changing the appearance and feel of the device, the habit to routinely pick it up was removed due to my unfamiliarity with it.
It’s not the best solution, but it seems to have helped solve my problem. There’s also a bunch of tutorials and documentaries waiting in my watch lists, which is something I see to be much more valuable than scrolling through socials.
I’ve figured out it’s best to deploy more self discipline towards the way I use my phone. This is a conclusion I keep coming to when facing things I’d like to change about my daily behaviours, and it’s always more difficult to figure out than I feel like it should have been.
Zak Michaelwaite 
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