Cell phones and smartphones are a hugeee time sink. If you ever felt that your phone is harassing you, if it ever happend that you wanted to do one thing and your phone distracted you into something completely different, than this is the article for you. Once you finish reading this and follow through with the suggested actions you will be able to regain your peace and use your phone efficiently.
So here’s the list of the things that you need to kill in order to make your phone distraction free:
- Social Media notifications – Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter
- Email – These two go without saying
- Text messages – majority of people never tried this, but it makes you feel so better! Try it for one week and tell me what you think.
- Shut down the ringtone for everyone except from your family members and closest friends
- Instant messaging
Whoaa, now your phone looks pretty dead, almost boring ? 🙂 It’s not ringing, it’s not beeping all over the place, it gets slick and cool and finally starts to be the tool you are using, instead of you being used by the it.
Now when you did the first step of cleaning out the garbage, now lets make it a little bit more useful. I am handling my phone calls aproximately twice a day. But sometimes I need to make an odd phone call in between, for those occasions I used to use Pakoomba call reminder, the Android app that I was already mentioning. Psst, don’t tell anyone, but I have an inside information that it will come to iPhone as well!
Pakoomba used to help me manage my outgoing calls. I keep it for those calls that I want to procrastinate on, and believe it or not, I get lazy about calling people. It got new features that I still need to test and is related to location based information. It will take you some to get used to it, but your phone is actually way more useful, when you use it less. I miss Pakoomba on my iPhone, I really do.
Smart phones main purpose, apart from talking on it, is actually capturing of information and being handy reminder for all the things you do. So having apps like OmniFocus that can help you determing the cause of action, not only based on time, but based on location that you frequent on is amazing and useful.
Get rid of games on your phone, especially if you are using it for work. It’s smart not to have distracting choices.
If you are on iPhone, turn of the annoying badges, clear your mind. Badges are red and draw a lot of attention. Every time I had them, they forced me to click on them, in order to get rid of them. Push notifications are bad, you don’t need them.
Remember, phones are there to serve us, so make them that way. Don’t be that rude guy in the crowd that constantly checks his smartphone (I’ve quitted that evil habit!), you are looking like a prick in your company and instead of being social, you are being the guy (or girl) who is socializing online. And you don’t want that!
And for the end, I will let you know my favorite phone trick, I keep it on silent, always.
