5 Ways To Use Your Phone More Intentionally
Hi I’m Constance and I’m addicted to my phone. The ease, the simplicity, the hours of enjoyment, it is all there for me. This past week I moved into a new apartment. I found myself using my phone more than ever. Shamefully an average of 5 hours and 12 minutes to be exact. There is a caveat, that my iPhone counts so many things as ‘screen time’ - even podcasts so, while I may not have been actively glued to my screen I was still using something on my phone for more than five hours a day. How much time do you spend using your phone? If you had to guess would you think more or less than five hours? In all honesty, I don’t see any of us ever having lives where we don’t need our phones. The question then is how can we use it more intentionally? How can we stop the mindless use of it and use it to better our lives? Below are a few steps I have taken to make my phone work more for me rather than the other way around. While my changes have been done on an iPhone all these tips work across the board and I hope that they can help you too.
Do a Purge
First off it’s best to know what you have on your phone. Pull out your phone and check the apps that you have displayed on your home screen. Do you have numerous apps that do the same function i.e. photo editors, GPS, flight deals, etc.? If so, consider keeping only one. I didn’t realize until I was doing an inventory of all my apps that I had many that I used so little they weren’t even downloaded on my screen. I knew that those could go. Secondly, it is important to know that if you take an app off the home screen that doesn’t mean that your information is deleted. I know that I still need my verification apps but I don’t need a whole folder of them on my home screen. I opted instead to hide them. After you deleted duplicate apps and hide the ones you don’t need it’s best to split screens.
Split Screens
Splitting a screen simply entails making it so that you have two screens on your phone - the main one you see when you first unlock your phone and then a secondary one. The first screen should house all the apps that you need on a day-to-day basis. I like to batch these together so that I know what I need them for. My two news apps and my daily devotion app are in a folder called ‘Morning’. My editing apps are in a folder called ‘Editing’ and Youtube, Skillshare, and Spotify are in a folder called ‘Relax & Learn’. You get the idea. The folders remind me what I have these apps for and fortify their purpose in my mind. On my second screen, I have all my food delivery apps, the app for Bourbon’s vet, my travel apps (airlines, taxi services, etc.), and a host of other things I need to check/use a few times a week but not every single day. Having these apps on a second screen keeps me from mindlessly scrolling through them when they are not really needed. I have also found it extremely helpful to have a plain color background to view them all on.
Silence the Noise
Now that the apps are purged and split up into what is helpful and what isn’t it’s time to really make your phone work for you. If you go to ‘Settings’ you can see a whole host of options to customize your phone. The most important of all of these is the ‘Notifications’ setting. Take a moment and open that app up. Go through all your apps that are listed and turn off notifications for all apps that do not require a living, breathing person to utilize to contact you. What I mean is to keep notifications on for messenger apps, phone calls, and text messages but silence everything else. This allows your phone to only seek your attention when someone is seeking yours. If you leave your notifications on for Facebook, for example, then you will receive notifications when a friend updates their status. It’s not information that they were actively trying to share with you but Facebook masks it as being information from that person. This causes you to have the impulse to open the app and look at the update and maybe even respond. Minutes that you really didn’t need to spend doing that.
Count the Minutes
Speaking of minutes I want to circle back to my original question, how much time do you spend using your phone? Did you know that you can set a time limit on your phone for your apps? This has been an actual time saver for me. This setting allows you to customize just how much time you spend on your phone. Once that time limit is hit you have three options: ignore for one minute, ignore for 15 minutes, or ignore for the rest of the day. If you hit ignore for one minute or 15 minutes three times it automatically disables the setting for the rest of the day. You can also monitor your minutes by adding a widget to the far left screen that shows you how much screen time you have used that day and what apps that time has been used on. When I was working in a formal office this is how I learned that I was listening to Youtube more than five hours a day and scrolling Instagram for more than an hour in total. Those five minutes here five minutes there really add up! Time not so well spent.
Hit the Snooze
Personally, I think the Health app is one of the most underrated apps out there. It can do so much! Not to mention the information it can store is beyond helpful when your doctor asks you a question and you aren’t sure about the date. For daily use though, the sleep section of the app is a hidden gem. The sleep section of the app allows you to set a sleep schedule. You can set different times for weekends and weekdays - although my puppy is going to wake me up when he thinks we should start the day, the struggle! The part about this I love the most is that your phone will give you a 15-minute reminder before your set sleep time. This has been extremely helpful when I’m about to start that third Netflix episode of the night. My phone will ring and I’ll remember that I wanted to be in bed at this time. It also sets your phone to ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode during those hours. That means that only numbers that you allow can get through to you. If you are like me and don’t want to cut off any communication between your partner or your mom then this allows them to still reach you. Crisis averted.
As phones get better and more user-friendly our reliance on them will only increase. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I honestly don’t know where I would be without technology but we also need to make sure that it is working for us and not the other way around.
