Want to Reduce Smartphone Usage?

As a teenager growing up in the 2010s, one of the biggest gripes that I had with my parents was their denial to get me a smartphone and their refusal to let me create a Facebook account, both of which most of my fellow peers in high school had. While at that moment, it felt that I was missing out on some of the essentials of life, I have grown to appreciate how those actions helped me get through an age wherein one’s brain is not developed enough to navigate the undue attention and distractions from gadgets and applications manufactured to command as much usage as possible. That was a decade ago and we have come a long way from the days of posts to the present days short-form videos/reels. Nowadays, most of us have seen at least one of the following sights; people walking along the road, in the subway or worse, in the washroom (yes, I witnessed this in grad school) scrolling these apps and “consuming content”. While there is a discussion to be had about the multitude of ways in which smartphones and social media apps have resulted in a more comfortable life, making connections easier, provide opportunities for smaller brands/artists to get visibility and so on, this article will primarily discuss some of the externalities caused by these technological innovations to our daily routines. Firstly, I will try to elucidate the problems that I associate with “excessive” usage of smartphones and consumption of short-form media content. Then, I will make an attempt to formulate some alternatives to these consumption patterns which could better help manage these amazing technologies and reap their benefits alongside minimizing the associated risks.

“Instagram is taking up too much time in my life.”, “If only there weren’t smartphones, I could have got much more done.”, these are some statements that I hear from peers in grad school. Some of the statements I would second during a time I was actively using social media (nowadays, I have an Instagram account that I login once in 2-3 months). While most of us set to use smartphones for a specified amount of time in a day, these limits seldom hold. This is not for a lack of trying nor an indictment on the ability of the individual user at restraining themselves, but a result of the ability of multi-billion dollar companies to design persuasive applications using well-studied psychological and habitual traits in humans that have evolved over millennia. Understanding some of these mechanisms will go a long way in finding solutions for un-regulated consumption and enabling a responsible usage. Some of you might associate to the feeling of waking up to your alarm on phone, thinking “I will get things done”, “I will be early to work and get to the item that I have been procrastinating for so long” or “I will hit the gym now”. Before these thoughts have a chance to register on your mind, a flurry of notifications pop up demanding your attention. Before you are cognizant of it, the next half an hour or more is spent going through the messages, scrolling through posts, sharing them with friends, all the while you are still in bed. Most of the resolutions that you had proposed are long past by now. Once you put your phone down, you make a resolve to not use your phone the next morning onwards. This is all but a familiar tale of how notifications became the first thing most of us look at after waking up, often times before the face of your partner.

This had me wondering, were notifications always meant to be as pervasive as they are now? First introduced in the SMTP protocol, notifications found mainstream adoption in 2003 with the Blackberry phone as an attempt to immediately let users know when they receive an email. Previously, users had to check their emails periodically to get notified about the same. While this might sound like an utilitarian feature in 2003 wherein emails might have been primarily related to work, in the current times wherein every service that you share your email with is in a race to get your attention and hopefully turn you into their customer, this quickly turns from being a feature that should be useful to one that is a distraction. This form of notifying the user found mainstream appeal with the introduction of push notifications to iOS in 2009 and Android in 2010. According to studies, an average adult in the US is estimated to receive about 46 notifications per day, with this number being noticeably higher in the case of children/teenagers. This amounts to about 3 per waking hour (assuming 8 hours of sleep) or about 1 every 20 minutes. Now, imagine trying to complete tasks that require your complete focus while someone interrupts you every 20 minutes. While it might sound dramatic, the fact of the matter is that the astronomical pace of notifications are unsustainable for maintaining focus and get actual work done. Not only do the constant notification dings interrupt us from work, it has been shown in studies that an average human takes about 23 minutes in order to get back to focusing on a task that they were interrupted from. Additionally, in order to compensate for the interruptions, subjects perceived greater stress and attempted to complete tasks faster which could result in increased number of errors.

Maybe you are someone who is able to regulate your urge when the notifications ding. Once you are in the app, there are additional tricks to maximize the amount of time you spend on it. These tricks are ever present in most apps that we have grown to use from social media, dating, e-commerce and games. Most of us at some point of time in our lives would have installed a mobile game. The expectation from a video game is to have fun for a certain period of time and then go on with our life. However, most mobile games are free and need to make money in some form. This incentivizes the developers to make games which form habits rather than making games which are fun. When you start playing these sorts of games, initially you seem to be making progress pretty quickly and are there is an element of joy to it. However, the momentum ceases as you progress through levels. With every level, the time required for upgrades only increases from a few minutes to hours and at times to days. This leaves you with two options, the first wherein the game becomes your second job. You find yourself playing the game in between the day albeit for a few minutes to maximize your progression. The other option, the one through which games generate majority of their revenue, is where you pay to increase the pace of the upgrades. There are no correct options here, you just pick your poison. It is a choice between spending enormous amount of your daily free time or spend some cash every now and then. No other game better exemplifies this predatory monetization policy than the mobile game Diablo Immortal, which required the players to play 100s of hours in order to unlock cosmetics for some characters.

One of the reasons such persuasive mechanisms are employed, to turn app usage into habits can be directly traced to the revenue models of these applications. Most apps derive revenue from advertisements such as is the case for Instagram/TikTok/Facebook/YouTube. The only way to increase revenue for apps then becomes to increase the amount of time users spend on the said platform, reminding us of the age old saying “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product”. While we could argue the ethical nature of such business models and the policy changes that may or may not be necessary to regulate such practices, the aforementioned points are to elucidate the perverse incentives that arise as a function of the economic models of apps.

What’s the big problem here, you might ask? I don’t mind spending some money on a game or looking at a few advertisements here and there. Let us look at social media/games consumption from the perspective of forming expectations. The sorts of short-form content that our brains are being exposed to with every reel/TikTok that we consume are wiring it to expect rewards (in the form of dopamine) at short intervals. When this process is repeated for enough duration and frequency, the act of obtaining dopamine at short intervals with relatively minimal effort becomes the new normal. Now, every time we sit at work in order to complete that essay/assignment which we find challenging, where rewards aren’t immediate, our brains gets uncomfortable. Moreover, now there is a cheat code in our pockets that will give us the comfort that your brain seeks. The act of resorting to our smart phones at the slightest signs of discomfort whether that might be while trying to work or when standing at a line in a coffee shop is not something which we should accept as the new normal. While it is great to have apps that are able to entertain us at whim, our brains need some downtime too. If we keep consuming things all the time, from the time we wake up to the time we sleep, our brains are missing out on the valuable inner monologues that we help us share our perspectives on things. How do we form opinions about things, if we do not think about those things and only consume content about the said things?

While the previous paragraphs might sound pessimistic, there are some practices that could help us better manage our relationships with these technologies. Below are some pointers that have helped me and hope you find some of them valuable:

• Do not take smartphone to bed. This will help you save countless hours otherwise spent looking at early morning messages, posts, emails which can wait for later. If you need to buy an alarm clock, so be it. You have a habit of reading in bed?, either purchase an E-reader or better buy the physical copies of books.
• Turn off as many app notifications as possible. Do you really need notifications on for Target, Duolingo or any of your games? You can remember to spend some time every day on Duolingo, and the worst that is going to happen is you might miss out on your streak. If you aren’t comfortable with turning off notifications, try to set your phone on do not disturb during the times that you are working or want to focus on your hobbies.
• A suggestion that is ubiquitous at this point, if you absolutely need to use social media, try to have them on your desktop rather than mobile phones. This would help regulate their usage by cutting down on the amount of time your spend on them and additionally, rid you of the distractions from constant notifications. An added perk, you get to enjoy your surroundings the next time you go out on a walk rather than scrolling through your phone.
• If you notice that you are using your phone when walking, waiting in line for coffee or at the slightest hints of boredom, it might be useful to keep your smartphone in your bag rather than your pocket. This could ensure that you restore some moments of solitude to your daily routine when you can recharge rather than scroll through newsfeeds worrying about events occurring half a planet away.
• With respect to email and messaging apps at work, have a policy of checking them at specified times in a day. If there is something urgent, people will find a way to reach out to you via other means. Additionally, try to be as comprehensive in your replies for emails or text messages which could reduce the amount of back and forth threads of conversations. Once you are able to implement some of these steps, you will notice that you might have a lot more time on hand than you previously did. If not used wisely, you may fall back to prior habits of idling time away on your phone. Hence, you could try resuming some of the hobbies that you gave up or start something that you have been craving to do, maybe it’s the guitar that has been lying in the corner waiting for some attention, or the DSLR idling its away waiting for some new adventures and beautiful snapshots. This would greatly help you by keeping yourself engaged.

I hope this article helped you add some perspective about usage of smartphones and gave you some motivation in altering some habits. I hope to catch you in another article about another topic giving my unfiltered thoughts :)