We’ve been talking a lot about screen addiction and overuse here over the last few weeks (and well, years), including our Curb Your Screen Addiction series. Well, we recently chatted with author Jake Knapp on our Spawned podcast, who has a well of fantastic strategies to help you curb your own screen time. Whether you’re trying to cut down on your gadget use, or want to make more time in your life for the things that matter, we think these simple tips and tricks can really help.
For all of his amazing ideas, be sure to listen to our Spawned podcast interview, and check out his new book, Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day.
Related: This one simple trick can help your whole family curb their screen time
Make your phone distraction free
Here on Cool Mom Tech we’ve talked a lot about making your phone less distracting, and Jake includes some tips about that though he’s pretty extreme (and hey, maybe that’s what you need). His suggestion is to remove all “infinity pool” apps, basically the ones where you can dive in and just keep on swimming. Think social media, email, and your browser to start. That means, when you pick up your phone, you won’t be tempted to grab and scroll.
Log out of apps
If ditching all your infinity pool apps doesn’t seem feasible, another step could be to log out of everything when you know you need to be productive. Leave the super important apps enabled, but then log out of all the ones that you’re not sure you really need access to. If you don’t try to login to it in the next 48 hours, you can probably get rid of it for good.
Related: This one affordable gadget can help get you a whole lot more organized
Clear off your home screen
Similar to turning your screen to grayscale, a simple trick that can work really well is to completely clear off your home screen. That means everything will on the 2nd, 3rd, even 4th screen. This allows you come quiet before you make the decision to jump in. And in that time, you might decide that you don’t want to take the plunge just yet.
Go back to wearing a wrist watch
I actually went back to wearing a wrist watch (and actually, I’m not sure why I stopped…) because it cut down on the number of times I was picking up my phone. I was pretty amazed, actually. But if you’re like me and you pick up your phone to check the time, then see all the notifications and messages you missed, having a watch will cut that whole temptation out completely.
Leave your devices
If you’ve ever been stuck without your computer or phone, then you know the feeling you might have if you decide to try this. But after you do it a few times, you’ll probably get used to it, and maybe even feel a sense of freedom you haven’t had in awhile. Now, you don’t necessarily need to leave your computer and/or phone at work every night. But maybe there’s one night a week that you just leave them in your office (or if you work from home, locked in your home office), so you’re not tempted.
Thanks to Jake Knapp for sharing all these awesome tips! Be sure to subscribe to our Spawned podcast so you can catch our episode with him, and never miss a future episode with all our fabulous guests.
Photo by Adrian Sava on Unsplash
