Is Thirty Seconds the Key?

I have pretty good self-control around my cell phone. When I get home from work, I take my Apple Watch off and since most notifications are off and everything else is on silent, I don’t experience many interruptions unless my phone is in my hand. Often, I take my phone upstairs and just leave it for the evening. I don’t have any need for that tether.

Where I abuse my phone is at work. I work an entry level job that is annoying, but not difficult. Most days I have plenty of time to browse, email, and text. So, I use my phone a lot, and that means I find myself in the cycle of clicking on certain apps over and over again.

The biggest offender has always been Instagram. Its algorithm is pretty good in showing me a variety of things that I’m interested in with a sprinkle of OF girls and rage bait. When I find myself bored on a call or needing to kill a few minutes, it’s easy to open up Instagram and just scroll. The problem is sometimes those few minutes turn into ten minutes and often the more I scroll, the more negative the content served up tends to become.

My solution in the past was to just delete the app. The moment I realize I’ve opened it up several times, I’d remove it from my phone for a week or two. This works well enough, but it creates a problem as well. I have an Instagram account to keep up with certain things, specifically my local comic book shop. So, when I’m ready to see what events they have going on, I have to reinstall the app and login. It’s a bit of a pain and of course, eventually leads to me overusing the app while at work.

Well, I think I’ve found a solution. After experimenting with a few different apps, I’ve been using ScreenZen on iOS. ScreenZen lets me set a timer for how long I use an app, as well as a delay before the app opens. When I began, I put a five second delay on Instagram, which was annoying but wasn’t enough to really curb my usage. After a month, I decided to increase this time to thirty seconds and wow, what a difference that made. Thirty seconds is just enough time to really make you consider whether using Instagram is worth it, but not too long to really piss you off if you actually want to check something.

To make things even better, I put a three-minute timer on the app. So, I have to wait thirty seconds for it to open, then I got three minutes to check what I need to check. Since I don’t really follow all that much, three minutes is more than enough time to catch up on my comic shop. Its almost mind-blowing how effective its been. It’s just enough friction to make me do something else for a few minutes, like read a few pages of a book.

This has revolutionized the way I’ve used my phone. I’ve been applying the thirty second trick to different apps and very quickly it’s made me aware of what apps I really care about and which ones I don’t. Now, if I could just find a way to use this process on specific websites, I really think my life could be changed for the better. ScreenZen does have some settings to block websites, but I haven’t found it to be nearly as reliable or useful as the app blocking. Oh well, I guess I’ll still need some self-control.