Reduce Your Screen Time, You'll Be Happier and More Productive
Being within reach 24/7 these days? A standard. We don’t leave our house without a smartphone in our pocket. It’s the third thing we couldn’t forget. “Wallet, keys, phone,” we whisper to ourselves before closing the door. We’re in standby mode somehow which makes it impossible for us to fully rest. And if we don't get rest, we're less productive. Reduce your screen time, be happier and more creative.
The digital era gives us many opportunities. Thanks to smartphones and the internet, we can stay in touch with people from all around the world. To stay updated on our friends’ lives, we don’t even have to stand up from our couches. We can call them or simply send a message. However, too much time spent online has its negatives. What are they? And why is it good to do a digital detox and reduce screen time from time to time?
Table of contents:
Online 24/7
Lock your screen
Digital detox in 6 steps
The goal is the balance
Online 24/7
The alarm rings, we open our eyes, unlock the screen, and start going through notifications. We check emails, give likes to the new posts on Instagram, reply to DMs… Start of the day for many people nowadays.
We’ve got used to our phones so much that we don’t even realize how much time we spend on them.
Screen time flies with the speed of light. So, half an hour in the digital world is behind our back in just a blink of an eye.
According to statistics, adults spend on average 3 to 4 hours on their smartphones daily. Some of them even more than that. And it’s not a productive time necessarily. Quite the opposite, social media, for example, offers plenty of room to procrastinate.
Multitasking is another issue. By checking phones constantly, our concentration is disrupted. And not only at work but also when we spend time doing our hobbies or enjoying activities with our friends or family.
The need to check our phones is getting stronger and stronger with time.
And the end of our day? It doesn’t differ much from its start. After closing work laptops, we put our eyes on personal devices. Believing it's relaxing time. And even though blue light does some damage too, experts warn before worse things - postponing our bedtime and stimulating our brains right before falling asleep. Because of amusing content, viral videos, or photos, we go to bed later than we should. Doomscrolling is what we spend the most time with when on social media platforms.
Smartphones lure us to watch the content for just “a bit longer” and we love to succumb. So, we stay up late and wake up tired the following morning.
To prevent this, it's enough to reduce screen time.
Lock your screen
Reducing screen time has many benefits:
- Stress level reduction connected with the constant need to check the phone.
- Improved concentration.
- Multitasking prevention.
- Living in the moment.
- Getting more rest as well as more sleep.
- Improvement in overall well-being – This is connected to our mental health primarily. Thanks to spending less time online, we don't stress ourselves that much over often unrealistic things and people we see online. Less social comparison is likely to prevent anxiety, depression, and other mental issues.
Digital detox in 6 steps
The goal of digital detox is not to stop using your phone. It's about creating a balance between time spent online and offline.
Follow these steps to achieve the balance:
- Morning sets the tone, don’t start it with the phone in your hand
Mornings are often fast. And especially with a mobile phone in hand. To start the day on a positive note, leave the Wi-Fi turned off for a bit longer than usual.
Emails, messages, and all the new posts on social media can wait. Maybe for your commute to the office.
What is important here is to take the phone in your hand after you’re done with your morning routine. Don’t let the online world disrupt it for you.
And if your phone was part of the morning routine, change it for some other activity. You can read a few pages of a book or your favorite magazine. In a few weeks, you’ll have another finished book on your shelf, which will make you happy and motivated to continue with this small self-development project.
Exercise is also a great activity to start your day with. Find yourself anything that will make you feel happy and kick off your productive day.
- Lock your screen every time other activity requires your full attention
If you know you have to focus on something fully, there is no space for a screen. Lock it.
Thanks to this you’ll do the best job possible.
- Set daily limits
Some of us stay online 24/7 because of our jobs. For managers, CEOs, and business owners this is no exception.
However, this standby mode disrupts our time for relaxation. Or it doesn’t allow us to have it at all.
Put yourself first. And set daily limits for how long you’ll be available online. Do the same with the social media scrolling.
- Cleanse your phone
There is an app for everything nowadays. That’s why we have our phones full of them.
Apps help us, they make our daily tasks easier. But sometimes we only use them once and never again. In such case, they only eat our storage.
It’s useful to go through your apps and uninstall those you know you haven’t used for some time. A half-year rule might help here - if you haven’t opened a certain app for longer than half a year, you most probably won’t need it ever again.
Remember, the fewer apps you have, the less time you spend on your phone. And the easier it'll be to reduce your screen time.
- Turn off notifications
There is nothing easier to reduce your screen time than to turn off notifications.
When you do this, you won’t feel the need to check your phone.
If you’d like to be completely offline for some time, turn on Airplane mode. You’ll get no notifications from apps plus no one will be able to reach out to you via SMS or calls.
- No phone, rather a good book
Experts recommend doing only activities that don’t raise our stress levels or blood pressure before bedtime. And since social media does quite the opposite, spend your before-bedtime doing something different. Maybe with reading a book.
If you don’t have any on your nightstand right now and are looking for a good quality one, check out our list of the best books to enrich your life with. There is one for each of you, leaders and creatives included.
The goal is the balance
Technologies are a big help.
It allows us to be more effective, well informed, and stay in touch with people from all around the world. We should be glad for technologies and use them to their full potential.
But in the moments, they are counterproductive, we should lock the screens. Leave the devices on the desk and focus on what’s more important at that particular moment.
Remember, the goal here is to create a balance between the online and offline worlds making our lives more balanced.
