How To Cure Phone Addiction

It’s the year 2020 and smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of modern life. The vast majority of Americans, 96%, own cellphones, and the average American spends on average 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on the phone. That amounts to 22 hours and 45 minutes per week. The data is similar for other developed countries, as well as many developing ones.

While smartphones can be very useful, it can also be very distracting and has the potential to kill your productivity and workflow.

Many smartphone apps are designed to keep your attention for as long as possible, and away from real life. Constant notifications also pull you away from living in the real world and draw you back to your phone.

For all the productive uses of your phone, there are countless other unproductive uses that often lead to people killing time and falling into the trap of procrastination.

Even for necessary tasks like responding to messages and emails, being bombarded with notifications can eliminate your ability to focus on whatever you’re working on.

And of course, even though social media has its uses for keeping in touch with others, it is also often filled with attention-grabbing content that may not add value to your life.

The constant checking of new updates, messages, and emails is a massive time killer. You can easily stay up to date with all this by checking your phone once, twice, or three times a day.

So how do you overcome phone addiction?

I can only speak from my experience, but my method is very simple. For most of the day, I keep my phone on airplane mode to eliminate all notifications and distractions, and I check it once at around 12pm, once around 4pm, and once around 8pm.

I also don’t have any time-killing game apps or any other apps that don’t offer practical value to my life. In fact, I never did and I was lucky that I was never really into that stuff, not because of any conscious decision but simply because I find them dull and boring.

If you intend to maximize your productivity I suggest you delete any apps that don’t add value to your life.

In the past I’ve noticed that I lose a lot of time constantly checking my phone. So this method of batching all my phone checking activity together to three times a day saved me a lot of time and also allowed me to focus on whatever I’m working on without distracting notifications.

While on airplane mode, I could still use my phone to listen to music, write notes, and take pictures, but now I don’t constantly check updates and that has greatly improved my efficiency at everything I do.

Of course, when I need airplane mode to be off, perhaps to look something up, search an address, check the weather, etc., I will turn off airplane mode and do what I need to do. But I always have an intended purpose in mind whenever I do go on my phone, so I don’t get drawn in with other distractions and have the discipline to leave after I finish the task I needed to do.

During those three times a day that I budget for phone checking, I respond to messages and emails, go through social media updates, read up on the news, and also spend time on Duolingo which I use to learn and practice languages.

As with most things in life, nothing is absolute, and sometimes I’m meeting up with people and need to be able to be contacted, and sometimes I’m out and about with others and need to be on call. So I don’t follow my airplane mode rule 100% of the time, but for the most part I adhere to it pretty well and it has greatly improved my life and productivity, saving me more time and allowing me to focus on whatever I’m doing. Most importantly it led me to be more attuned to real life and to better appreciate the present moment.

So if you ever struggle with phone addiction, I suggest you give it a try. Try turning on airplane mode to eliminate distractions and notifications. Try batching your phone activity to certain times in the day. Try deleting all the apps that don’t add any value to your life. Try to always have an intended purpose in mind whenever you need to turn airplane mode off so that you can quickly get back to real life after you perform your task. When you actually need your phone for social purposes then be more liberal with these rules but generally try to stick to them and see how different your life can be.

I bet you won’t regret it.