How to reduce screen time — the ultimate guide
If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma you know that an unhealthy relationship with your smart devices isn’t necessarily your fault. Nevertheless, it’s probably not a good idea to wait until the industry changes from an attention based business model to a value based business model to get your life back. So, after about 10 years of refinement, here’s what has worked for me:
1. Reflect on your habits
Be clear about specifically when and why you want to limit your screen time. Overall, a good rule of thumb is: you want the screen to serve you, not the other way around.
Ask yourself:
- When do I notice that I’m not in full control of my screen time?
- What specific negative consequences has excessive screen time brought into my life?
- How much time do I actually spend looking at screens and what percentage of that is wasteful? (get accurate measurement of this with the screen time function on your phone or laptop & then analyse the results)
- What goals do I have and how is my screen time helping or hindering me achieving those goals?
I find that a good analogy of wasting time on your screens is that it’s a little like the time forwarding machine from the 2006 Adam Sandler movie Click. You end up missing out on all the boring parts of life by skipping past them with [insert your app of choice] only to realise at some point that the boring parts is mostly what life is made up of.
… after a while you notice that you’ve inadvertently skipped past spending time with your kids or an important deadline at work.
Skipping past the “boring” parts of life makes it speed up which increases stress. It also becomes increasingly difficult to make sure you’re really just skipping past the “boring” parts and after a while you notice that you’ve inadvertently skipped past spending time with your kids or an important deadline at work.
2. Distinguish between useful screen time and wasteful screen time
Our smart devices are incredibly useful, they can also be distracting. Distinguish between the apps that overstimulate and distract you from the ones that are more like utilities.
Overstimulating Apps
TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, some games, etc. are designed to be as stimulating as possible. With these sort of apps, dosage makes the poison. It’s not that you don’t want to use these apps at all. 10 minutes of senseless scrolling on Twitter can be entertaining and keep you up to date, 1 hour on the other hand is just a waste of time. Yes, this includes news.
Utilities
These are the apps you wouldn’t overuse or waste significant amounts of time in even if you had unlimited access — such as the calculator, alarm clock, settings, uber, etc. You strictly use them to get things done and it would be a real inconvenience to need be able to use them at a given time and not be able to.
Hybrids
There are other apps such as slack or mail that are a utility but heavily rely on distracting notifications (banners, badges, sounds etc) to keep you opening them 15x a day instead of an equally useful 2x a day.
1. Set a Screen Time
Doing screen time right takes a lot of refinement, if you set it wrongly it just gets in the way of getting value from your smart devices.
- Set allowed apps. Always allow the pure utility apps. Most of the apps and websites you use are actually just utilities, things such as a calculator, the train ticket booking app, etc. can all go into allowed apps.
- Set a time restriction till significantly after you start work and significantly before you go to bed. This allows you to use the hybrid apps the way they provide the most value.
- Set Specific app limitations for the overstimulating apps. I recommend between 5–20 minutes per app. Iterate over screen time restrictions whenever you notice too much time wasted in a specific app.
- Set a screen time passcode. Have someone else set the passcode who is regularly available but also wont give you the code if its not an emergency.
2. Notifications
Reduce app notifications and badges to the bare minimum on your laptop and phone. You can toggle notifications in settings. It turns your usage of a smart device from reactionary and impulse based to pro-active and with a specific intent. At the very least set specific focus times where basically all notifications are off and particularly watch out for badges (the red icon telling you about x new messages) and sounds which really trigger impulse distractions.
3. Morning alarm
Do not use your phone as a morning alarm. Use a standard alarm clock or even an Alexa morning routine with which you can set a routine for a pleasant waking up experience. This means your day doesn’t start with you holding your phone. Check this out for inspiration: https://smarthomeinsider.co.uk/alexa-routine-ideas/
4. WeChat
WeChat is a not a typical hybrid app. It’s recommended to add it to the “always allowed” category if you need it for essential utilities on a day to day basis. There isn’t a perfect way to deal with WeChat but there are some extra screen time settings available:
- Toggle “Explore” page menu. On WeChat you can specifically toggle the short videos and other tiles in the “Exlore” or “发现” tab through your settings > general >explore tab settings (发现页面管理). This can help minimise time wasted on the short videos feature.
- Adjust WeChat internal notifications. You can change notifications within the app through settings > notifications.
- Mute all groups. It’s advised to mute basically all groups and public accounts. You can set individual notifications for specific group members.
- WeChat Phone Notification Settings. Carefully review the notification settings for WeChat on your phone and reiterate when it doesn’t work for you. Consider not showing message badges or lock screen notifications.
5. Laptop
Leave the laptop at the office/work or add screen time to your laptop (this is much harder than for your phone). If you find yourself escaping your phone screen time through your laptop take action. Here is a chrome extension to keep youtube useful: Distraction Free Youtube
6. Outdoor Activities
Sign up to some sort of organised sport or outdoor activity where you make a real commitment to show up. It’s important to get time away from your devices where you are in the moment and completely forget your digital connections and your brain can clear its cache.
7. Iterate
When you notice yourself slipping into screen time territory that feels unhealthy don’t blame yourself, brush it off and tweak your screen time routine. There’s thousands of UI designers and engineers working to keep you tied to your devices. Simply adapt your screen time policy, it will get better with each iteration.
When you notice yourself slipping into screen time territory that feels unhealthy don’t blame yourself, brush it off and tweak your screen time routine
8. Share
Feel free to let me know if you have any other ways for healthier screen time.
