4 Unconventional Strategies for Slicing Your Screen Time in Half

Welcome to The Purpose Memo, a newsletter where I give you ideas for wrestling your life back from digital technology and living a principled life. 

If someone forwarded you this email, join them and other readers here.

Read time: 10 minutes

“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a person’s life is made up of nothing but the habits they accumulated during the first half.” 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

I recently had a conversation with a serial entrepreneur who has an interesting story. After successfully growing and exiting a multi-hundred million dollar business, he became increasingly unsettled by his attachment to his phone, noting his proclivity to check it relentlessly. His next venture became clear: build a company that helped people break their phone addictions.

During our conversation, I was lamenting how my otherwise disciplined personality seemed to be no match for my bad habits in the digital world. He reciprocated, and pointed to that particular phenomenon as one of the key motivators in his decision to invest so much time and energy toward helping people put their phones down.

The idea we discussed is something I’ve come to identify as The One Percent Exception.

The One Percent Exception suggests that even if a person exhibits admirable self-control and determination in several areas of their life (i.e., a “one-percenter”), they will still struggle to control their behavior in the digital world.

You might notice the contrast in your own life:

This is a common pattern.

The gargantuan technology companies that require a screen to deliver their product have taken on a Thanos-like persona: harnessing the power of modern-day infinity stones—smartphones, laptops, tablets, watches, TVs, and algorithms—to exert undue and unwanted influence over our lives.

While several conventional strategies like switching your phone to gray scale or setting screen time limits can prove helpful for a time, I’ve found them insufficient.

In this newsletter, I want to give you four strategies of a more unorthodox nature, all of which have been instrumental in getting my personal screen time down from 5+ hours a day to less than 90-minutes.

1) Do an app audit

How many apps are on your phone right now? Did you know there is a way to find out?

Before you look, take a guess. Once you have your guess, navigate to Settings > General > About (if you’re an iPhone user). You’ll see the number. Were you close?

Most of us treat downloading an app like eating a snack. It’s a quick decision whenever we feel like we need it. But this is a treacherous approach.

Albeit regrettably, common practice is to behave as if our phones are some sort of a digital appendage. They’re in our hands, our pockets, or right next to us at all times. Every time you download a new application, you’re inviting a faceless company into a very private part of your life. Though that singular addition may seem innocuous, a group of strangers (profiting from your engagement) is now only one notification or home screen swipe away from whiplashing your attention away from the life happening in front of you to an immaterial distraction on your device.

Of course, not every app is a net-negative. Many are quite useful. But we ought not give them the benefit of the doubt, knowing the ease at which they can snatch our attention on command.

A few categories you might consider combing through on your phone:

Whether it’s social media, work-related, or ecommerce apps, you’ll appreciate the aftermath of a digital declutter. Don’t wait. Do it today.

(I keep a written list of the apps on my phone along the reasons for keeping each one. If you’re interested in seeing it, reply “Yes.”)

2) Remove your ability to download apps

This approach has made the single biggest difference in my personal screen time.

Here’s the three step process:

This approach works effectively for both a) the apps you’ve already deleted during your app audit and b) the apps you’ll consider installing in the future.

For past apps: Deleted apps are exceptionally easy to redownload after they are removed. Without the proper constraints to prevent it from happening, they’ll find a way to weasel themselves back in. Get them off and keep them off.

For future apps: Taking the Amish approach is less about being forthrightly dismissive and more about having a keen sensitivity for how new technologies strengthen or weaken the things in our lives that matter most: our families, communities, and values.

The friction of consulting someone else for the screen time passcode requires you to deliver something of a defense case, which encourages a bit of critical thinking and deliberate consideration. And that’s the whole objective: to eliminate the haphazard adoption of the next shiny app and replace it with serious scrutiny about its place on our priority list.

3) Buy a casual, everyday watch

A few months ago, I started wearing a twenty-two dollar Casio Watch.

Until that point, I’d formed an interesting habit without realizing it: my default method of checking the time was my phone. I would occasionally wear watches to work, but muscle memory would still have me pull my phone out to peek at the lock screen clock.

This creates a problem. Using your phone as a watch will dramatically increase your pick-ups, a metric you should be monitoring closely. No matter how brief, every glance at your phone has the ability to hook you with a notification and drag you through an assortment of apps (which you never intended to check) that do a superb job of distracting you from whatever it is you were doing before you wondered what time it was.

So get a watch, but get a watch that you can wear all the time. Mornings, nights, weekends, and everything in between. Over time, you’ll break the impulse to use your phone for the time (or the date, which poses the same threat).

An Apple Watch won’t do. But I think you knew that already.

(Side Note: Where have all the wall clocks gone?)

4) Carry a pocket notebook

I’ve been a faithful pocket notebook carrier for years. There are a number of ways that a pocket notebook can replace your phone, but I have three core uses:

1 - Jotting down interesting ideas or random questions

2 - Transcribing profound quotes

3 - Storing miscellaneous things to remember

If you want to reduce your screen time, you’ll need to get comfortable spending extended amounts of time away from your phone. You’ll have to learn to put it in a drawer, intentionally leave it in another room, or completely turn it off for a stretch.

A pocket notebook is your ticket to that separation.

It’s hard to stay away from your phone when you’re consistently pulling it back out to send a quick text before you forget or jotting something down to remember later. When you have a pocket journal, you can write it all down and keep your head clear. Even if the things you’re jotting down are mostly things you want to remember to do on your phone when you get it back, that is progress.

Your notebook is not one of those infinity stones with limitless distractibility.

It’s a notebook.

My wife and I were doing some family Christmas gift planning yesterday when I came up with a good idea for our four year old: a board game.

“Why don’t we get her Candy Land?” I suggested. “That’s a classic, and it’s fairly easy to understand.”

My wife responded, “She already has Candy Land. It’s just been stored away.”

Right.

My last pocket notebook entry: “Play Candy Land with Taytum.”

Four unconventional strategies.

Do an app audit. Remove your ability to download apps. Buy a casual watch. Carry a pocket notebook.

They might not be the traditional strategies, but how are the traditional strategies working for you?

Try these four together and check your screen time after a week. I can all but guarantee significant improvement.

Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

Thanks for reading! Two quick things:

See you next week.

PW