Look Up: The Essential Guide to Decluttering Your Smartphone and Reclaiming Your Time
Life doesn’t have to speed by.
Have you ever been out in public and done a quick survey of what the people around you are doing? How many of those people were looking down at their phones? Sure, it’s nice to be able to find a restaurant in a new city or get directions in the palm of your hand, but where do we draw the line? Do you need to keep constant tabs on your favorite Instagram hot body, check your investments 20 times a day, or know all the news in the entire world as it’s happening? For years I’ve had a little voice in my head telling me something is wrong with spending this much time on my phone and being subjected to constant notifications. I started listening to that voice, and the more apps I deleted, the better I felt.
I will say I have a love-hate relationship with my smartphone. It’s great to find a restaurant with five stars and 1,000 reviews, check the weather to make sure I’m not walking into a tornado, and quickly find out via google if the snake my dog just killed is poisonous. But I used to get along just fine before I had a smartphone, arguably better. Being 36 years old at the time of writing this, I can remember a time before we all had I-phones and didn’t get mad when someone in the group thread turned our text bubbles green. I’m not saying I want to go back to printing out directions from map quest or celestial navigation, but I think we can cut away the app fat.
I want you to look up more often, but first, I’m going to ask you to look down and, in the words of Marie Kondo, do some tidying up. What apps are the most distracting and causing you to look down the most? My guess is it’s a combination of social media, news, games, and email, or maybe you fell down some other rabbit hole. Whatever the apps that are causing you to keep your head down the most, delete them! While I’m a proponent of permanently deleting all social media and games, if you aren’t ready to take that step, at least delete them from your phone. Not having the apps on your phone will create one more barrier to hopefully keep you from wasting 20 minutes or more of your life. You can apply this same principle to the news, email, or any other app. Get the apps off your phone, and if you still need to access certain accounts do it deliberately from your laptop or desktop at specified times and not for entertainment or out of habit.
The point is I want you to stop looking to your phone for entertainment; it’s a tool. Tools are used for specific tasks, and then we put them away. You don’t need me referencing studies about how social media is addictive or how information overload makes it seem like our lives are going by faster. Listen to that voice in your head telling you, “Something is wrong.” As you remove apps and spend less time on your phone, notice how much more time there is in a day. Notice that the illusion of our lives speeding up begins to fade away.
