Cleaning my iPhone home screen in pro of more productivity
I know that I spend too much time on social media apps. Twitter and Instagram are my nicotine. The same way I quit smoking ten years ago, I need to stop wasting time on social media and learn more about things that make me better personally and professionally.
Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users and they do that for the sake of profit, which means they are not going to change is up to us to do something to detox from them.
If you watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix at the end, the ex engineers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter recommend that you need to disable notifications. That’s the first step, so I did, but I did more.
My new home screen
The first thing after upgrade to iOS 14 was to clean my home screen, which now looks like this:
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Remove all the Social Media apps from the screen, and those red dots badges were unavoidable because I see them all the time by just looking at my phone
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Send all apps to the App Library, so I have to swipe or search for them
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Add Books.app, a constant reminder of the books I have on my phone ready to be read
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Add a widget stack with the most relevant information:
- Battery
- Files
- Reminders
- Calendar
- Google Search
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Photo widgets for happiness
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Mindful Affirmations my source to a more positive mindset.
App Limits
I set 2 hours daily limit (looking to put it to 1 hour) for all my social media apps.
The goal
Simple, less screen time and/or more quality screen time, meaning more time learning and reading that liking memes. This week my average was 3:22 a day. Let’s try to bring that down to 2 hours.
Conclusion
It is on us to stop wasting our time on things that will not bring anything good to our lives.