Digital Distraction
You have just woken up and the first thing you do is to check the messages on whatsapp and posts on instagram!! Are you someone who cannot start their day without their phone? Well! you are not alone, a lot of us are in the same situation.
We spend a good amount of time on our smartphone. Be it playing our favourite game, or chatting with our closed ones or scrolling endless social feed. We usually have an urge to unlock our phone and see if something new has popped up (FOMO, right?).
If you check your total screen time, it will be around 4–6 hours a day or even more!. The question is do you really need to spend so much time there?
What can be done?
You need to change your habits. I know it is easier said than done. But, you can do it provided you are willing to take that small step to make a big difference. Suppose you are spending six hours a day on your phone, you can’t bring it down to 2 hours a day the very next day. But you can surely make it five or five and a half and try it for one week and progressively come down to your desired goal.
There are some suggestions that you can incorporate to reduce your digital time and use it somewhere more productive:
- Setup non-digital hours: You can allocate a specific time during the day when you will not be around any digital medium, neither phone nor laptop. You can read a book, play your favourite game(offline xD), go for a walk or spend time with your friends and family. It can be anything based on your interest.
- Change your unlock method: You can remove fingerprint, face or eyes lock from your phone. I know you spent a good amount to get those features in your phone. But, you need to decide what you want? It’s a choice between good features and a good future. xD Alternatively, you can set up a long alphanumeric password, something really long like (abcxyz#123456797) as your screen lock. This will prevent you from unlocking your phone unnecessarily. Trust me, this will work!
- Use Screen time monitoring tool: You can use Google’s Digital Wellbeing or Apple’s Screen Time Dashboard to see the breakdown of time that your device usage. This gives you a good idea of what apps consume your day.
- Set your limits:You can set up an upper limit for individual apps which will turn it off on reaching that limit. You can control your notifications so that you are not looking at your phone always. There are other features like greyscale that make your digital life not so interesting and you put your phone away.
Conclusion
Cutting down on your screen time can give you a lot of physical and mental benefits.
So, if you want to take back control of your day, be more productive, or just try to spend a little less time on those games and apps, give these suggestions a try.
I’d love to hear about your experience and any suggestions you have.
For more details, please check out these resources:
