Enough Buzzing, Enough Ringing.
Next in the series of screen time reduction is….notifications.
If you are looking to lessen your screen time, tightening up the way you receive notifications is a must.
As covered one way or another in many of the posts I’ve written, a life well-lived is about being where you are.
Trying to be present when you have things incessantly buzzing and dinging on your wrist or in your pocket is a ridiculous exercise. Even if you are temporarily able to “drop in” to a moment, you are aggressively removed from it when you sense that buzz on your desk, see the light from your screen, or hear a loud ding from across the room.
Unsolicited stimulation from your phone is one of the greatest enemies to living life in the present moment.
Let’s see how we can tighten it up.
Your Notifications function is in your phone’s Settings or Control Center. Once there, you will see a list of all the applications on your phone and how they “alert” you. Before going through the list, take a second to assess which applications are critical for you to receive real-time notifications from (there aren’t many). Turn off the rest.
We live in an age of up-to-the-minute doomsday headlines. No other time in human history could you be walking with a friend and find out that a minute ago there was just a tragedy in an area of the world that you have never been to, will never go to, and know absolutely nothing about. I will not go down a rabbit hole of how unnatural and damaging this phenomenon is for human beings, but to bring it back to your phone, I STRONGLY recommend turning off news updates. You should be an informed citizen, but do it on your own terms and at a frequency that fits your job/lifestyle demands.
For most folks, social media is now the biggest culprit in terms of excessive screen time. I would strongly recommend turning off notifications for these apps in particular. It’s at least one more point of friction that you’re adding before ending up in zombie scroll mode. The “twitch” factor (grabbing your phone with no intention) is still high with these apps regardless, but at the very least not getting alerts about likes, comments, updates, a stranger going “‘live”, etc etc will keep you off of them at a higher clip.
Remember that points 1-3 are great, but you can bypass all of them by just keeping your phone on airplane mode (there it is again)/or off for as much as your day allows. I mentioned this in a previous post, but experiment with what you can “get away with” - test a few minutes here, a few hours there and see what happens.
Finally, remember that this is not an easy process - there will be many scroll binges along the way but any attempt at cleaning up your phone use is still a huge win. Keep going.
“If we are searching for peace outside, we will never find peace within.” - Neem Karoli Baba