Living in this gadget-savvy, we all are more less dependent on our smart phones. As digitization is taking up much space in our lives, we are heavily relying on applications and tools to do our daily chores and smartphones have gradually become obsessions for us. Starting from morning alarms, to daily meetings, calendars, scheduling daily appointments, our smartphone has resumed the job of our virtual assistant and we are more or less happy to take few of the burdens off our shoulder. Not to mention the importance of various social media platforms in our lives which have completely taken a fair share of our everyday productivity. Even if a few of us will disagree, we all are living a virtual life simultaneously in all these social media platforms and invest a fair share of our time on those applications. Youngsters, especially the millennials are heavily impacted by the use od cellphones and sometimes seem to take drastic measures to stay relevant across the afore-mentioned virtual platforms. Even if the results have sometimes led to grief consequences, millennials are yet to understand the negative impacts of cellphone addiction.
Some of the tips which are mentioned below, might help the youngster to give up mobile addiction:
1. Keep Track of your Daily Use of Phones:
The most basic step to keep yourself off your phone is to literally acknowledge your addiction to smart phones. You can start with setting up alarms to check your phone for a brief period. Starting with every 15 minutes, you can gradually move to every 30 minutes, then 45 minutes and then eventually set your alarm after every hour. When your alarm goes off, you can spend one-two minutes going through your notifications before resting the timer. To deal with response-anxiety and feel stress free, you can tell your close friends or family that you may take time to respond to their messages.
2. Turn off Push Notifications:
The very sound of notification either from receiving a new text message or your photo being liked or a new video shared by your favourite channel can drag you back to the screen. One of the easiest ways to stay irrelevant to these never-ending notifications is to mute them. These so called ‘important messages’ are not important than your real life and they can wait. This is an amazingly simple way to cut down on disruptions and by turning off push notifications for as many apps as you can, you will notice that you have stopped going through most of these applications.
Even if a few of us will disagree, we all are living a virtual life simultaneously in all these social media platforms and invest a fair share of our time on those applications.
3. Delete Unproductive Applications:
The next big step is to delete those applications which have genuinely nothing productive to offer and takes a huge time of your unconscious scrolling. If you delete the app for good, you won’t be tempted to open and indulge yourselves in it. If you have to precisely pursue an app to use it, you’ll gradually cut down on the ‘accidental encounters’ which has become an unavoidable phenomenon when you start pitter-patter on your phone.
You can keep the necessary applications that encourage yourself to take up a new hobby like reading or learning a new language, but anything other than that which just limit your ability and a waste of time should be deleted. To proceed a step further, few of the applications can be deleted entirely and can be navigated through your smartphone’s web browser.
4. Don’t Use Phone While Sleeping:
One of the most important aspects of getting rid of mobile addiction is not letting your phone to be the last thing you see at night and the first thing you browse in the morning. Go for a regular alarm clock instead of setting up alarms in phone. Also don’t charge your phone by your bed side and take maximum precautions to keep it out of reach, so that, you won’t be feel compelled to start your day by going through a bunch of messages and updates.
