Wellbeing "Hacks" for Your Smart Phone

These are the five steps I took to convert my iPhone into a pared down device with just the essentials.

Step 1: Decide what I absolutely need my phone to do

Step 2: Remove all unnecessary applications

Step 3: Turn off notifications

Step 4: Set up screentime limits

Step 5: Unsubscribe from text alerts from vendors/third parties

I have included are more details about how I approached each step. In Section II below, I also discuss using data on your Smart Phone to take back control of your phone usage to support personal wellbeing habits.

Step 1: Decide what I absolutely need my phone to do

I started by considering what problem am I really trying to solve? For me, the problem is that my phone has become a device that has made it too easy to engage in unproductive, unhealthy behaviors. In reality, this is not about turning back the clock to a romanticized time before smart phones existed, and many smart phone functions are quite helpful.

I asked myself two interrelated questions: What are the functions I need or want my phone to perform? What are the problematic functions that I want to reduce or eliminate?

Primarily, I want my phone to enable two-way communications with real humans. Secondarily, I also recognize that the phone has some features that I desire to have that I would otherwise need a separate device for, such as a camera. Finally, the phone has several conveniences that are useful in a mobile function, such as access to my calendar so that I’m not late to appointments.

In terms of the problematic functions of the phone, my big goal is to address my obsession with checking emails, especially after hours or when it interrupts other activities that I’m enjoying. I also want to avoid getting sucked into social media apps, which are a big time waster. And finally, my smart phone’s easy access to the internet and shopping apps are driving me to buy stuff too easily without considering whether I really need something or could get it another way, like borrow, purchased used, etc.

Step 2: Remove all unnecessary applications

With these goals in mind – what I want my phone to do and what I don’t want it to do – I was ready to take a ruthless look at what’s on my phone and repurpose it to achieve my needs. I thought of this like purging the cupboards of candy and processed foods when I was making a lifestyle change to improve my eating habits.

I discovered that I had three choices for each application: (1) Keep it, (2) delete it, or (3) remove it from my home screen.

Applications I decided to keep were Phone and Message. I considered that I have a few apps that function as phone and messaging that I use for international friends and family, like WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Viber. These apps conform to my primary purpose of enabling two-way human communications. There is also an app we use to communicate with our son through his watch (in lieu of getting him a phone) that tracks his location.

Other applications that were easy to decide to keep were my Camera, Photo, Calendar. I also kept apps that are related to banking and navigation. I don’t find that I abuse any of those apps, I simply use them occasionally when I have a real need.

Then, I started deleting all the shopping accounts that I’d downloaded over time, including Nike, Nordstrom, Target, and, yes, Amazon. I deleted social media accounts too, including Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. I found it surprisingly hard to delete LinkedIn (where ironically I'm posting this "how to"), but realizing that I often scroll compulsively through the posts and feeds, I deleted it from my phone and now access LinkedIn through a web browser from my laptop.

I deleted all gaming apps, some of which my son had downloaded to my phone, like Pokemon, and others that I had downloaded like Yahtzee (our generational difference is really apparent here!)

As I got ready to delete my Mail app, I felt troubled. What if I need to access an email message? This is where having a third option came in handy as a mid-term solution. I removed the app from my home screen, but I did not delete it entirely. I decided to experiment to see if just making it harder to access would curb my habit. If it isn’t enough, then I will delete it.

I took a similar approach with several other apps that I don’t want to be using regularly, but especially where there is some data that I would lose if I deleted them outright, like my VoiceMemo.

In the end I went from 141 apps that took up multiple folders across four screens on my phone and deleted half of them. Of the remaining 70 apps, about 50 are hidden from my home screen, so no more than 20 are currently visible. More on assessing apps and screen usage in Section II below.

Step 3: Turn off notifications

A huge distraction for me is the notifications I receive from my phone and the various applications. I opened up my settings, went to notifications, and turned them all off. This for me is a game changer in taking back control of my phone. It also meant no more apps with red circled numbers crying out to be opened on my phone screen!

Now my phone lets me know if I have an incoming call, but that is the only way that my phone proactively notifies me of something. More on assessing notifications below.

Step 4: Set up screentime limits

I had begun to notice that I was picking up my phone late at night and getting pulled into using it before bed. There is tons of data on how much getting on a screen negatively impacts sleep, so I recently decided to adopt a screentime limit for myself, much in the same way that my son’s device has downtime features in play. I set my phone downtime to begin at 8pm and end at 7am.

Step 5: Unsubscribe from text alerts from vendors/third parties

By keeping the text functionality on my phone, I still was receiving a lot of automatic alerts that are designed to drive me to shop, which is a behavior I’m trying to change. I systematically went through my texts and selected “delete and report junk” to several dozen text alerts to help reduce the inbound texts I would receive from bots and political messages.

Section II - Screen Usage

One feature of the iPhone, and other smart phones, is there is a ton of data that you can access about your own usage of your phone.

First, I was curious how many apps I had downloaded on my iPhone over the years. Since so few apps cost money, I don’t think much about downloading apps anymore. And some apps have been downloaded by my son to play on my phone, and stored in a “games” folder that I never even open.

You can find out how many apps you have on an iPhone by going to your Settings, General, and selecting About at the top. Underneath how many videos and photos you have on your phone, you’ll see Applications. When I began this process, I had 141 Apps.

Next, I was curious how much space these apps were taking up on my phone storage. Staying in the Settings, General, you click on iPhone Storage. This will show how much total storage you have, and how much you are using. It even breaks down the types of data in a handy bar chart so you can see what is making up that total storage. When I began this process, I was using 81 GB of my 128GB available, and you’ll see in the image from the portion of the bar chart that’s red, the vast majority of what I was using was to store the apps on my phone.

Then, I looked at my screentime. How many minutes or hours was I spending each day on my phone? I had no idea. Under Settings, select Screen Time. You’ll see a daily average, but you can also select “see all activity” and go to the “week” header at the top to review your usage over the last seven days, and the average over a longer period. I learned that last week I averaged 2 hours 25 minutes per day, and my total usage was just under 17 hours.

If you want to get really geeky (which I did), lower on the page you can select “show categories” and find out what apps you are using the most. I found out, not surprisingly, that mail and messaging were two of my top apps. I was more surprised to find out that Google maps was in the same ballpark. On each of these three apps I spent over two hours last week, about one third of my total usage.

Also, I was interested in how many notifications I was getting each day across all of these applications. To find that, scroll down on the screentime page to the section headed “notifications. I found out I was receiving on average, 67 notifications per day. A lot of these are tied to my Apple Watch, so I get buzzed for many of them. No wonder I feel so distracted!

Finally, while browsing this very helpful screentime section in settings, I stumbled across data under the header, “Pickups.” I didn’t know what this meant, so I did a little research (yes using my phone, which was still operating as a full smart phone at this point). I learned that pickups are simply how many times did I pick up my phone in a day and use it? No matter if I spent one minute or 30 minutes in a single pick up, it will record each time you use your phone. I had 50 pickups on average per day. I also learned, according to the internet, that that’s pretty average.

Now, I’m pretty geeky, so I decided to use all of this information to track before and after metrics for my four-week abstinence experiment. My goal is to significantly bring down my daily average of 2.5 hours on my phone, described more in my companion article "A Holiday From My Smart Phone."

Not everyone has iPhones, so this is an article with similar information about managing Digital Wellbeing on an Android phone.

Sofia Michelakis?sometimes describes herself as a "motivating storyteller."?Professionally, she is a philanthropic advisor who helps people turn their vision for social change into action. As former lead strategist and deputy director overseeing the Giving Pledge and past board chair of Social Venture Partners International, she is a trusted bridge between philanthropists, their teams, and nonprofit leaders. Sofia has partnered with influential global visionaries on giving strategy and family engagement, developed engaging curricula and winning models for social impact.