Have you ever found yourself spending more than three hours glued to your phone’s screen? You were probably on Facebook liking posts or YouTube watching your favorite blog, name it. Many people spend most of their day on their phones doing a whole lot of nothing. Some even end up forfeiting necessities like sleeping all in the name of “Smart” phones. Fortunately, even smartphones can be made dumb!
Smartphones are very popular because of the apps they have: from social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, telegram, Snapchat, and Twitter to messaging apps, entertainment apps, among others. There is a wide range of smartphone apps: in today’s age, there are apps for nearly everything you can think of, and then some.
These apps can be either inbuilt or downloaded from app stores. You can easily add or remove these apps from the phone to suit your preference: this provision comes in hand in making your phone ‘dumb’. Phones were created to enable communication between people in different places: sometimes you’re better without that extra junk.
In the process of making a smartphone not-so-smart, you will need to do away with a lot of the phone’s “smartness,” that is the apps. Below are two simple steps that will help you spend less time on your smartphone.
1) Remove all the ‘Junk’
The first step is to clean your phone: do away with apps and files that are not necessary. Most of the unnecessary apps are downloaded ones.
First, you need to know which app is always taking much of your time. Can you live without it (and by live, I mean being able to breathe with ease)? Will deleting it affect any critical aspect of your life? If the answers to the two questions are yes and no, do away with the app.
Uninstalling apps from your phone is an easy thing: it can be manually done by opening the location of the app, click on the app, and finally, click the uninstall button.
The procedure for deleting inbuilt apps varies with the type of phone one has. If you have an android phone, use your USB to connect to your computer and then remove the apps from the computer. This procedure is done using the adb shell commands
With time you will learn to live without these apps. You can decide to occasionally reinstall some after a while given that you have mastered the art of staying without the app.
2) Turning off data connection and wi-fi
The Internet has a lot of content which no one can ever exhaust it. This makes people want to know more and more, and they end up spending a lot of time there. Applications that are known to be having many users in a given period are those that require internet access: apps like YouTube, snapchat, Instagram, among others.
Occasional turning off mobile data and wi-fi connection will help one keep off these apps. You can decide to go without accessing the Internet for a specific period, or one can choose to go all the way and disable these connections from your phone network settings. This will help you find other things to entertain you and you will gradually cut down on the time spent on your phone.
By following the two steps above, you will find yourself with a phone that can only call and receive offline messages: a dumb phone. If a smartphone is doing you more harm, you can opt to buy phones that only do the above functions.
You can do this for a short or long period of time, to destress and detox yourself of unwanted stressors. The Internet can be fun, but sometimes, not very good for your health.
