Our smartphones are a modern marvel, granting us access to near-limitless content at just the touch of a fingertip. But we don’t need to tell you: They’re also incredibly distracting.
“If you look at how people use their smartphones and how many times they pick them up per day, I mean, it’s just stunning,” Laura Vanderkam, author of books including Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done and I Know How She Does it: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time, tells SUCCESS®.
The average American spends five hours and 16 minutes looking at their phone every day, according to one 2024 study, and that’s before taking into account time spent looking at laptops, tablets or TVs. So, how do you set up your phone to avoid slipping into a scrolling spiral and wasting valuable time? We asked the experts and came up with this list of nine tips.
1. Take control of your notification settings.
David Kadavy, author of Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters and The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating and Start Creating, recommends keeping your phone in Do Not Disturb mode whenever possible. “Use favorites to allow notifications from any critical contacts,” he says, but otherwise? You probably don’t need to be getting every notification in real time.
If keeping your phone on Do Not Disturb isn’t doable (what if the kids need to call from a number you don’t know?), you can always mute certain numbers or apps so that those messages come through but won’t ping you with a notification. “Identify whoever is the most annoying—the WhatsApp group that you need to be on but don’t actually need to follow in real time, the people who you might want to know [what they said] eventually, but it’s not your babysitter texting that you need to come home right now—and then make sure that those alerts do not come through in real time,” Vanderkam says.
2. Make each app earn its spot…
“Don’t allow time-wasting apps on your phone just because you might need them once in a while,” Kadavy says. If you find that you’re spending more time than you’d like scrolling Instagram or X, it’s a great idea to simply remove those apps from your phone. Kadavy even takes this one step further and uses parental controls to block certain websites from his phone—you can’t get distracted by an X link your friend sent if you’re unable to open the link in the first place!
3. …Or at the very least, protect your home screen real estate.
If deleting social media from your phone seems too extreme, either because you use social media for work or you just really want to be able to check TikTok over lunch, Kadavy recommends “burying” those apps in a folder and putting the things you really need on your home screen. “Don’t confuse ‘used a lot’ with ‘use-ful,’”’ he quips. We’re talking about home screen staples like Maps, Uber and Kindle—not Facebook and Instagram.
4. Swap passive scrolling for active learning.
Speaking of Kindle, Vanderkam says putting an e-reader on your phone is a no-brainer. “In the moments when you are using your smartphone as a way to kill time, you want to make sure that you’re doing that in the most positive way possible,” she explains. Lots of people say they want to read more but struggle to meet their reading goals; having Kindle or Libby at the ready can help.
If reading isn’t your preferred productive time killer, consider trying language apps like Duolingo or Babbel, general knowledge apps like Crash Course, or self-improvement apps like Deepstash.
5. Set up shortcuts to automate tasks.
In iOS, there’s a feature called Shortcuts that lets users create, well, shortcuts. In the simplest terms, these are ways to use your apps without opening them, and many shortcuts can help with saving time and energy. “Probably the most overlooked [iPhone pheature] has got to be Shortcuts,” Kadavy says.
Shortcuts can let you create or add to a note, turn text into audio, sort information, find a coffee shop within walking distance—even contact people to let them know you’re running late and give them an ETA using Maps data and your current location. And you can use Siri to run shortcuts, meaning you can just ask your phone to complete any of these actions.
6. Don’t use your phone as an alarm.
According to Kadavy, the a.m. hours are the most creative ones in the day—and if you’re staring at your phone from the moment you wake up, it’s way too easy to get sidetracked during a time that should be used for more pressing tasks.
“I like to think of it like when you wake up in the morning, your mind is like a burning building, and what you do with that first hour of your day is who you decide to save,” Kadavy says. He recommends getting an old-school alarm clock and using those early hours for something more pressing, like working on a client pitch or putting together an important deck.
7. Do use your phone as a phone.
“Actually using your smartphone as a phone is a great idea. People should call people,” Vanderkam says.
She recommends taking some designated weekly planning time to look at the upcoming week and “triage your calendar.” Do you see any scheduled meetings that you strongly suspect could be handled with a brief phone call?
“When you see those little bits of schedule clutter, you can take that time to pick up your phone and call the person to say, ‘Hey, I see we’re meeting next week. I want to be prepared. How can I be most prepared for our meeting next week?’” Vanderkam explains. “That’s when the person says, ‘Oh, I just want to know when you’re gonna finish that thing,’ and you say, ‘Thursday!’ and then it’s off both your calendars.
8. Or consider getting a second phone.
“I know, it’s like, ‘Oh, who are you, like, the King of France?’ You can have two phones,” Kadavy laughs, but he means it—it can be a real productivity booster to have one phone on you when you’re working and another that you use during downtime. That way, you don’t have to choose between fun apps and productive apps.
“I mean, most of us right now have an extra phone lying around, right?” he asks. If not, you can get a used smartphone for a few hundred dollars. “If you’re using it well, $200 for the amount of productivity that you can unlock isn’t outrageous. That’s a screaming bargain.”
9. Turn it off and put it away.
Sometimes the best way to make your phone work for you is to get it the heck away from you. In moments where you really want to put your head down and work, or if you find that the tips above aren’t having the desired effect, one of the best things you can do is just not look at your mobile device while you’re trying to be productive.
“The cause of productivity is usually not advanced by spending more time on your phone,” Vanderkam chuckles. “And so unless there’s something you’re specifically doing for your job on your phone and you have an app that’s associated with that, you want to spend less time on your phone.”
Photo from Peopleimages.com/Shutterstock.com
