Over the last two years I have attempted to use Social Media less and user my phone less, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I do not like to put to much shit online anymore. In particular due to what we are seeing the bigger companies such as Meta and Alphabet do. Target advertisement, selling our data, build social graphs, and so on. It is not really a surprise, but I do not want to feed this particular machine anymore, or at least at the bare minimum. Secondly, I noticed that my daily screen time was climbing, thank you Apple for the brutal truth, to a level where it hovered around 4.25 hours a day. Which to me was insane. Also, as a consequence of this I could see I was reading less books and painting less miniatures. Both things I really enjoy, and did I really enjoy being on my phone? I am honestly not sure I did, since I had a tendency to get into arguments online.

In this blog post I will describe how I have brought my screen time down. Before we start I am not guaranteeing that my solution works for you. However, I can promise that if you bring down your screen time, you will feel better or at least I do. The times I provide in this blog post is on average.

Here I am not talking forums like Reddit. But rather Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and so on. The doom scrolling is a really thing and for me it is in particular bad on Twitter and Mastodon style sites. However, I started small, by removing LinkedIn from my phone, just as a test back in December of 2022. This alone reduced my average screen time by 15 minutes a day. Not a lot but quick results. It was kind of barrier that I now had open my browser and then navigate to LinkedIn. Next, I, like so many others, got mad a Elon Musk and quit Twitter. First by uninstalling the App on my phone and logging out in the browser, and now I have delete my account. Whilst, I did replace my twitter fix with mastodon.social. It was significantly slower in terms of how often people posted and it reduced my screen time by further 30 minutes a day. Although it took a while I decided in November of last year, to delete the IceCube mastodon app from my phone. Which brought down my phone screen time by another 10-15 minutes, so roughly an hour saved. In this is include that I started using the website elk.zone for viewing mastodon posts. Which like LinkedIn added the barrier of me having to navigate to the website.

So basically I can already see profits from just removing Social Media. Now lets take a look at a specific application / website Reddit!!!

Removing Reddit and Moving to Hacker News, Daily Dev, and Others

Honestly, I love Reddit, and I consider it more than a social media. Similar to how I view Facebook, due to the simple fact that it also provide news, help forums, and more. I spend an unforgivable amount of time on Reddit, even now.

However, in December of last year I was having a very long Christmas vacation and decide that I wanted to test how much time I spend on Reddit on my phone. So I uninstalled the App. One thing I did want to keep was the technical news. So I started using Ycombinators Hacker News, daily.dev, and others to get my news. Although, I have reduced the news site to the once that do not gamefy the experience (bye, bye daily.dev).

Day one reduced my screen time by 1 hour and that has been consistent since. This is in part because, I have moved to spend 5-15 minutes in the morning, quickly catching up on tech news sites which stops me from doom scrolling Reddit. Also, I no longer randomly pull out my phone to scroll Reddit. I do not even bring my phone to the bathroom at work every time I go anymore. I have no reason, there is no Reddit. Although I will check mastodon via elk.zone once in while.

Removing YouTube

The final thing I removed was YouTube. This was not because I spend a huge amount of time on YouTube. However, after I removed Reddit I found myself spending more time on the YouTube. So it had to go. My time spend on YouTube was climbing to roughly 30 minutes a day. But now it is gone.

Side Quest: Two phones, Work and Private

So even before this main quest I started a side quest. I used to have a combined work and private phone. Which meant I would often open my phone to check work Slack and work Teams in my spare time. Some days it was two hours outside of work.

The only way I found to adequately solve this, was to have separate phones. I cannot emphasise enough how important this has been for me. In particular during weekends and vacation. My option to simply LEAVE my work phone in my bag, has had an immensely positive impact on my mental health. I am aware that not all can do this, but if you can do it!

Next step Changing my phones Home Screen

homescreen

My latest and currently testing idea is to change my phones Home Screen, this is what it is called on iPhone. So my thought process was this: If opening a web browser cause enough friction for me to not open X. What happens if I move my apps to a second screen?.

So I started by looking at what apps do I use the most?

Phone, for dialling (thank you Captain obvious)
Clock, for checking times in other countries and setting timers
Health Apps, I need to use some of them a lot.
Home, for the very few parts of my dumb home that is actually smart.
Music and Audio Apps (Apple Music, Podcast Apple Classical, Audible, Apple Books, Apple iTunes Store)
Languages Apps (Duolingo and Mondly)
Apple Photos
Things
Calendar
Signal
Apple Messages

None of these are really time consumers. I get in, do what I need to do, I get out. Unless I am browsing for books or music but that happens rarely on my phone. So they got to stay on my home screen (see right). The only thing, that can be a time sink for me is photos. But I have to be in a specific mood, to really sink time in into the app.

One might wonder what about Duolingo and Mondly, and why both? Well first of I do a set number of lessons per day/week in either app, so no doom learning… sadly. So I can stop myself. Then secondly why do I have both! Well Duolingo does not have Farsi (Persian) Mondly does. But I prefer Duolingo for Spanish… so yeah…

I also needed to quickly see what was next in my calendar and I like to see my exercises states for the day. So therefore the home screen also got to keep my two widgets for that. I only deep dive twice a day into my exercise states. Once in the morning when I arrive at work, I check my pulse from my morning walk and how I slept. Then around an hour before I go to bed I also check my health stats through out the day. Note to self remember to be better at weighing your self in the morning.

I have only been running with this setup for two days. But so far it saves me 20 minutes of screen time. I am really looking forward to how much more I can reduce my screen time with this.

So that is close to two and half hours of reduction in screen time. A thing I am very pleased with. Next, I will discuss some “why I did not mention X”.

Why did you not mention insert X

Focus Mode: A focus mode is where you set your phone in a custom “do not disturb mode”. Where you control who and what can send you notifications.

This is an epic feature on both Android and iPhone, and I use it a lot! When I get to work I only accept notifications from four people! Everything else can wait! However, I started this before I started keeping proper track of my screen time. So I cannot fairly include it!

Putting your phone in a drawer: YES! I want to do that… I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But I will.

I do actually turn my phone screen down on my desk and that helps to. But I haven’t actually timed the effect of this alone.

Timers?: So I know some people set times and they focus for X minutes and then have Y minutes respite. I simply do not work like that. I cannot handle it, I am not sure why yet. But it doesn’t work for me.

Finally, I will provide some findings.

My findings

Improved Focus: I have found that since I started this journey. My focus has gone up and I can now focus on tasks for longer. Which is really nice.

Withdrawals: I actually experience withdrawals, where I got panicky that I was checking social media X or app Y. However, it let down pretty quickly and I do not miss the apps anymore, with the exception of Reddit.

More Alert: I am more Alert to what happens around me. When I drive on the bus, or sit at a cafe. It is quite nice. I see so much more.

I hope you liked this blog post.

./Lars