I Simplified My Smartphone to Regain Control of My Life

I constantly read articles like these and keep thinking - if you lose this distraction, soon you'll find another one.

I noticed a few months ago that hackernews and reddit were sucking more and more time out of my life. So I installed impulse blocker, removed the apps from my smartphone, thinking I would get so much more free time. Guess what, I was wrong - I just spent my free time with other distractions, sometimes to a much worse net benefit. Not reading HN would mean to lose the thin grasp I've got on state-of-the art tech and all the panoplia of interesting content.

I've tried the folder before, as well as turning the screen gray (guess what, most apps don't have enough brightness contrast to be really usable while on grayscale), and nothing worked.

Maybe distractions can also be positive in your life - I surely enjoy watching a documentary to spend time, and the entertainment it gives you also brings something valuable to your life, while r/funny or facebook don't. Maybe the trick is to select when you wanna have trivial fun and stick to that.

“I put all my apps in one folder“

I do something similar and can recommend it.

I keep all sorts of apps on my phone, some I don’t need very often like the Find My app, some of which I only initiate through Siri like Phone and FaceTime, some of which are donor apps to some kind of central app already installed or provide some other kind of infrastructure like my content blocker. All of those apps, every single app not on my first screen or Dock except my banking and finance apps go into a folder on the 2nd screen labeled “Etc.” and the banking and finance apps go into a folder right next to that one labeled “Bank”. I did this because those handful of times I need a particular app I don’t access often, I’m not going to remember where I put it if I tried to organize everything by some kind of category, I’m not even going to remember where on the screen of page 2 I placed a particular category. Nothing in my Etc. folder is organized in any kind of fashion other than the order in which things were dropped in.

When I need it, Search will find it, but everything I access every single day or week is right there on the first page. No badge notifications, and notifications only for messaging and calls and card alerts.

I did all this years ago, but it doesn’t matter much because I’ll just turn off screen time if I really want to use the apps.

My new solution works better: put reasonable limits in place (like 15 mins per day for time waster apps), and have someone else come up with the code so I don’t even know it. There’s a code recovery process I could use in an emergency but I’ve never bothered.

> By applying a black background, it no longer makes the phone as appealing and when I open it, it keeps me calm, with room to breathe and use my phone intentionally.

I may have to do this on my laptop. I have a tendency to go r/unixporn to a degree, and spend to much time wasted on filler when I should be working on something.

I’ve done something similar to the author. I have OmniFocus and a folder in my dock. Most used apps are on the front page of the folder. Nothing else on the homescreen.

I can’t wait for iOS 14 and the new app library, though I hope there will be a way for the list view to be the default view. I’ll also probably end up adding a few widgets back to the homescreen.