Productivity

By Brad Beckstrom

I’ve been playing with the screen time tracker on my iPhone. Apple recently introduced screen time tracking in response to legitimate public concern about rampant addiction to looking at our iPhones.

Apple hid this app in the settings section so if you look for it on your home screen or search bar you won’t see it. You need to go to settings and search for it. I really don’t feel there’s enough data in there for me to decide if I have a smartphone problem but I should keep an eye on it. Actually, I already know I have a smartphone problem. I really don’t need another app to tell me about this. I just want to manage it.

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By Brad Beckstrom.

“You are too close to the TV, back up, your going to ruin your eyes!” my mom would say. If I were still a kid today she’d be shouting “You’re too close to your phone, put that thing away.” It would be good to hear, as I sit here, flicking, clicking, responding, on my phone then picking up my iPad.

Like many, the problem for me isn’t the iPhone or iPad, it’s the massive flow of information, it’s the screen time. The sensation of being 4 inches from this screen or group of screens that bring this massive data dump into our lives. We often hop from one screen to the next from the laptop to the phone to the tablet to the TV.

I wanted to slow this down, significantly. I wanted to reboot, shut stuff down and spend more time stepping back and looking around. I wanted to go on a low information diet. I wanted to slow down to improve.

Here’s how I discovered the power of slow.

It’s your time, not theirs.

I stopped looking at notifications on my phone. I turned them off on lots of apps like Twitter and Facebook, many others. These apps were also sending me email notifications. I also shut those off. Twitter and Facebook and other apps will still be there, and I’ll still use them but it will be on my time versus the steady stream of interruptions many of these apps were creating. You can do this in settings on your phone or go to your settings page, example facebook/settings. If you still want some background notifications, just shut off email and change your notification settings to silent. With a little fiddling, you can even turn off the little red notification badges that pop up and attach themselves to the app icon. Then you can use social media on your schedule, and slow that stream of notifications to a trickle.

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[Read more…] about The Power of Slow. 8 things I started doing to slow the hell down.