Changing my phone setup ๐ฑ
I was always annoyed by the vast number of notifications I receive daily, or how overloaded my control center looked like. But I never made any changes.
Reviewing notifications
And with every new app I installed, I allowed them to push more notifications.
Only after reading the post of Herman something clicked and I decided to take action.
Following his advice, I reviewed every app and whether it should send out notifications or not. For the vast majority of apps, sending out immediate notifications, I changed this to scheduled or not at all.
I for example do 1 daily Duolingo lesson in the morning, only 1. So I'm not interested that someone took my xth place. Similar to Strava. It's good to cheer for each other, but it shouldn't notify me of this when I'm working.
I've been way too lenient with this.
No notifications or scheduled ones is a huge difference.
And the nice thing about putting apps in scheduled notifications is that I can clear the whole list in one go. No more manual clearing per app.
For anyone interested in understanding all notification types or making changes to your current setup, have a look at this video.
Using grayscale mode
But I didn't stop with notifications.
I also automated greyscale mode.
Every day, at sunset, my phone turns into black and white. And when it does, it's a lot less interesting.
As my phone is in Dutch, providing screenshots wouldn't really mean much, so have a look at step 6 of this article on how to enable this automation if you're interested. The only difference I did is to run the automation on sunset and sunrise, instead of at specific times.
Dumb phone
The last I did is to create a dumb phone by using the free app Smile.
I only kept a few apps I want and should use. Everything else I pushed to the app library.
I'm not sure if it's because I'm still in focus mode, or I made all these changes, but I've not been using my phone as much as I used to. Or at least, limiting my usage of apps that do not provide value to me.
Let's hope I can make this stick.
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