How to avoid time confetti by defusing your weapon of mass distraction (part 2)

Time confetti is a phenomenon that seems to hit a nerve.

Popularized by Harvard's Prof. Ashley Whillans, it describes digital technology "fragmenting our leisure time in a way that makes it hard to use this time for something that will relieve stress or make us happy".

After my first post on the phenomenon last week, I got many questions on how to better deal with our smartphones – the biggest "weapon of mass distraction". I want to answer these questions by offering some actionable tips that you can apply starting today. 

In today's and next week's post, I will thus look at two things: Setting up your home screen for maximum efficacy and minimum distraction, and setting boundaries for when and when not to use your smartphone. So first off, here's what the home screen of my smartphone looks like:

As I mentioned in last week's post, there are a couple of basic things I've done to minimize stressors. There are no email and group chat clients, since I use these from my computer only. Also, my smartphone is switched to grayscale, which – as you can see – makes it a lot less seductive. And there are no notifications from apps, except for those that I really can't live without. For me, these include Todoist (a to-do app) and Productive (a habit-tracking app).

Moreover, here are three tips I personally use for setting up the home screen for maximum efficacy and minimum distraction. First, the home screen is my only screen. Apart from what you can see on the screenshot, there are no additional apps. If I need to use another app, I use the search function. That way, I reduce the risk of unintentionally getting distracted.

Second, I've put apps that I want to use frequently in a place on my screen that I can easily reach. That's the bottom-left part of the home screen. Apart from my to-do and habit-tracking apps, the ones located at this spot include Journey, which helps me align my day with my weekly and longer-term goals.

Third, I've positioned apps that I want to use selectively – such as WhatsApp, WeChat or the Safari browser – at a place on my screen that requires some effort to get to by hand. This is the top-right part of the screen. Also, I’ve put these apps in a separate folder called "Other". Both the positioning and that folder add extra friction to using these apps – which keeps me from mindlessly turning to them for distraction during my leisure time.

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Until next week,
Christian