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Tuesday Tips #4: Increase the effort it takes to access your phone
Alright. After reading this you might be saying….
But I’ve found a lot of people haven’t actually thought of this. Or if they have, it’s still a good reminder, because it’s something you can get out of the habit of doing (myself included).
Tuesday Tip #4: Increase the effort it takes to access your phone. For me, that’s usually turning it off and putting it in another room. But any amount of friction you can create will help.
Doing this will help with two things:
1) creating friction which in turn reduces use and
2) highlighting how much of our phone use is truly mindless.
When you first try this, you’ll initially notice you still constantly break your focus to look for that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine in your pocket even though nothing is there.
But I bet that the vast majority of time you go to reach for your phone and it’s not there, you’ll decide it’s not worth it to go through the effort to actually access your phone. I’ve found this is true even if it only takes a little extra effort.
So pretty soon you’ll break the unconscious habit of always breaking your focus to reach for your phone.
Finally, you can actually focus on what you want to be focusing on without your reptile brain interrupting you.
And when you realize you won’t even take the minimal effort it requires to get your phone, it will highlight to you just how unimportant whatever it is you wanted to do on your phone. If you won’t take 1 minute - literally 1 minute - to walk in the next room to get your phone, is what you were planning on doing on it really worth your time?
It’s a good exercise to make sure the time you spend on your phone is actually time well spent.