'I was wasting three hours a day on my phone - one simple trick cut it to one'

A few months ago, I noticed myself spending a lot of time on my phone, excessively so. I would put a show on Netflix in the evening and then whip out the phone as well, endlessly scrolling reels on Instagram especially. There I was after spending eight hours at a computer screen only to 'escape' by putting two more screens in front of myself.

Once I noticed it, I went digging around in the 'Digital Wellbeing' section of my phone and it was frightening. It can tell you how long you spend on individual apps, how many notifications you get and clicked on, and even how many times you unlocked your phone on a given day. It was eye-opening stuff. 

In one day in March, I spent over four hours using my phone; Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Paddy Power, Livescore, Gmail, the Irish Independent, LinkedIn, X, Spotify, Whatsapp. That isn't even the full list. I had unlocked the phone 75 times. Presuming I had slept around eight hours that day, I unlocked it more than four times every hour, so basically every 15 minutes of the day. I checked the averages over a few weeks and I was spending more than three hours a day on my phone.

I took drastic action and headed off to Harvey Norman while on annual leave from work and bought a Nokia 3210. While it could be connected to the internet, it didn't have any apps, bar the game of Snake which was a great throwback for me. I was reduced to calls and texts and I let me family, friends and a few colleagues know about the switch and how they could reach me. I started on that two-week break from work and then continued with it over weekends. For a while, every Friday, I would swap the sim card from my normal Samsung smartphone into the Nokia. It was great for a few weeks but you miss certain apps of convenience; Whatsapp, Spotify, online banking and Google Pay. 

ABOVE: The Nokia 3210 will still set you back around €80

One thing the Nokia highlighted to me was the number of times I reached for the phone for no reason at all. I went to pick my father-in-law up from the pub one night and while parked up outside waiting, I reached for the pocket. With nothing really to do on a Nokia 3210, I quickly put it away again and sat people watching instead. I would not have noticed that inclination if I had my normal phone because I'd have scrolled for ten minutes without really questioning it. It's like a reflex and a lot of people have it. The 'dumb' phone shone a light on the habit for me. 

It was an extreme way of cutting screen time but slowly the hassle of switching every few days became a drag. I could have gone with the Nokia completely but I do need my phone for work and more and more it's part of daily life. Taxing the car, booking flights, checking the bank, paying for coffee, etc. I wanted the convenience of all of those things without the mindless scrolling, and I found the best solution.

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I landed back in the settings of my smartphone and started playing around with the different modes and routines you can programme. I now have a weekend and evening mode which fully disables almost every app on my phone from 7pm every evening to 7am in the morning, and over the entire weekend from Friday at 7pm. All I have during those times is calls, texts (and Whatsapp), banking, Google Pay and Spotify. Everything else is disabled; it even turns the screen to greyscale mode so the colours don't entice you to tap certain apps. It's not just that notifications are turned off either; if you tap a disabled app, you get a pop-up message to say access is unavailable in your current mode. 

You can obviously reset the phone to normal whenever you want and go back to scrolling but once you have that barrier there, you tend not too. It's like the Nokia 3210 in disguise. Putting an extra step or two between you and the doomscrolling makes you second guess it. Why am I picking up the phone now? Why am I tapping on Instagram? Do I need to? Usually the answer is 'no' so you just lock the phone again. For me, it has really worked. 

Now, on weekend days I spend 30-40 minutes on my phone, according to the Digital Wellbeing section in my settings. During the week when apps are disabled from 7pm rather than all day to allow me to work, I've managed to reduce my screen time to around the hour mark. Given that figure was three hours a few months ago, that is a win in my eyes. I've reclaimed two hours of my day, 14 hours a week, 60 hours a month or 720 hours a year. In the grand scheme of things, that's the equivalent of a full month of mindless scrolling I'll have taken back over the course of a year.

It's scary when you think about, isn't it? If you do one thing after reading this article, go into the Digital Wellbeing section of your settings and see just how long you're on the phone every day.