Phone Settings That Will Save You 12+ Hours Per Week

In last week’s newsletter I talked about how social media is rotting your brain.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to show you some adjustments you can make to your phone settings that will reduce your screen time.

We typically assume that the greatest threats to our productivity are lack of motivation, procrastination and lack of will power.

In most cases, it’s distractions that are our biggest enemies. The biggest distraction being our phone.

Our phone is an incredibly addictive slot machine in our pocket.

Learning how to overcome the constant pull of our phones on, can lead to significant improvements in focus and motivation.

Most people fail to resist the urge to check their phones because they rely on willpower, which is a finite resource.

The answer lies not in will power, but in setting up our environment that promotes certain behaviors.

For example, if you want to eat healthy, it is much easier to remove all the junk from your house than relying on will power.

We’ve reached a point where we no longer have control over our phones. Our phones have control over us.

The never ending pings has us constantly reaching for our phones for quick dopamine hits.

The greatest resource at our disposal isn’t time or money; it’s our attention.

It’s time to fight back. To claim our attention back from these attention thieves and use it to create the life that we want.

I’m going to share some phone settings that you can implement right now that will instantly reduce your screen time. So let’s dive in!

Gray Scale Mode

The simplest trick is to turn your phone into gray scale mode aka make your screen black and white. This makes your phone less stimulating and less interesting.

App developers intentionally use vibrant colors to trigger dopamine responses.

Think about why the notification badge on apps are a strong red. They’ve tested all the different colors and found that the red has the strongest pull on our attention.

Studies have shown that simply turning on gray scale reduces daily screen time by 20-50 minutes each day.

Here’s how you can do it on your iPhone:

1. Open Settings

2. Click on Accessibility

3. Select Display & Text Size

4. Enable color filters

5. Choose Grayscale

Manage Notifications

Notifications are another method app developers use to constantly grab our attention. The best way to overcome this is by turning off all notifications for most apps.

I personally keep notifications on for reminders, texts and calls. But everything else is off.

By doing this, you get to choose when you want to use certain apps vs. having these apps control you.

For most apps, especially social media, you want to remove all notifications. This includes sounds, badges and banners.

You can do this by:

1. Opening Settings

2. Select Notifications

3. Click on the app

4. Disable notifications

This will take a bit more time to set up if you have a lot of apps but I promise that the effort will be worth it.

Update Your Home Screen

Your home screen should be a reflection of your priorities.

What apps do you have on your home screen? Do they reflect your priorities?

If not, it’s time to make some adjustments.

Remove all distracting apps from your home screen. That way you have to search and dig through your apps to find it.

I also recommend adding the screen time widget on your home screen so you have more awareness on how much time you spend on your phone.

You can do this by:

1. Touch and hold an empty area of your home screen until apps start to jiggle

2. Tap the + icon in the top right corner

3. Scroll down until you find the screen time widget

4. Choose a widget size that suits you

5. Tap Add Widget to add it to your home screen

6. Drag the widget to your desired location

7. Tap Done to save changes

Bonus Tip

The final tip here is to turn off the raise to wake setting and the always on display settings on your phone. When the screen stays dark, you’re more in control on whether you choose to engage with your phone or not.

Here’s how to do change the settings:

1. Open Settings

2. Navigate to Display and Brightness

3. Disable Raise to Wake

4. Disable Always on display

There you have it. Apply these settings on your phone and watch your screen time drastically go down.

Sorry for all my Android users out there. The settings varies per phone so you will have to Google the steps yourself.

I hope you found this helpful. Would love to hear from you on what you found to be the most helpful. You can reply directly to this email.

I will see you all next week.

Cheers,

Ashvin