The phone screen and distraction

One of the things I started to work on a bit last year was to reduce the number of notifications I get on my phone to checking the phone all the time.

The phone is something I use a lot for listening to music (Spotify), making payments and Twitter. I also use it to get around with Uber or Ola.

I use WhatsApp and Telegram. But also use Signal for checking my text messages. I use Todoist for dumping all the tasks into it.

I use Pocket and Kindle to read. My book reading is still very strongly paper based.

Last month I spent over 10 hours at an airport as part of a layover between flights. To kill sometime I spent organising my apps into folders and reducing the number of screens I had on my phone.

This is my first screen or rather home screen.

This is the second screen with all the apps setup in folders.

Two taps instead of one

I stopped opening some apps I often open as a default because of muscle memory.

Grouping all the apps also meant I need two taps instead of one to open an app. Which means one more mindful step.

I have removed the Facebook app from my phone.

This experiment is working out and I am going to have more tweaks to cut down even more of my time spent on the phone screen.

I want to at some stage get to the ultimate stage of not having Slack on my phone.