How to Make Your Phone Less Addictive

0:00If you're a parent of a teen or have teens in your life, it can be hard to figure out the right way to approach social media and technology. Ultimately, if you feel like your teens are ready, there are tools to help. Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections for what your teens see and who can contact them, plus time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. An Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. That's Instagram.com slash teen accounts. I'm Christine Zierkluset and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show. This week on ThePod, we are hitting a theme.

1:00If you listen to our episode on Tuesday, you know it was about kids and tech and how so many parents are struggling with managing things like screen time, phone and social media use. It's only fair that we also address the adults in the room. This episode I'm talking with Wirecutter, Tech Writer, Brenda Stolliar, about how you can reset your relationship with your phone and gain some of that attention back. Brenda just published a couple pieces on this topic, which we'll link to in the show notes. Brenda, welcome back to the show. Thank you. I'm happy to be back. It's great to have you. I feel like we have reached a critical moment in society where people are really, really tired of how addicted they feel to their devices. We actually covered this. We've covered this a couple times on the show. We've talked about the brick and it's this device that locks you out of apps.

2:04Am I tapping into kind of the zeitgeist of what's going on right now? A thousand percent. I think that this has always been an on and off trend. We've seen people wanting to digitally detox in the past. It's not new, but I think this is the worst it's ever been. Ironically, I think that's due to the rise of social media apps because people are going on Instagram and TikTok to post about digitally detoxing, which is so funny. It's like you're scrolling through TikTok and it's like how to get off of your phone while you're scrolling through your phone. Yeah, there's just been this rise in tips and other devices that you can use. I know we're going to get into it later, but like dumb phones or the brick that you had mentioned, certain apps that you can use. So you have seen this trending a lot, ironically, on social platforms about people trying to get off of their phones and off of social platforms. So you've written a couple of articles recently, sort of around this theme of a digital detox.

3:06How to create a better relationship with your devices. How to kind of manage your time and your attention in a way that you want to be doing. I'm curious if somebody is kind of feeling that way. They feel like they might be spending too much time on their phone. How do you do an audit of that? How do you actually figure out if that's true? Is it just sort of like a Lucy Goosey vibe or is there some concrete way to figure it out? So I hate to break it to everyone. I feel like if you're questioning whether you're spending too much time on your phone, you probably are. Or if you find that you need to do something productive, you're like, I'm going to do laundry today. Or I'm going to clean my apartment today. And then suddenly three hours go by because you've been sucked into Reels or TikTok. Perhaps there is a bit of a problem there. If you really want to see the numbers, it may ruin your whole day, but you can. There is a screen time feature on iPhone that allows you to see a full breakdown of your average screen time.

4:11How much time you spend on specific apps. How many times you pick up your phone? Oh wow. And actually, in the settings, you go into settings and you can find it. So you would go into, well, let's do this in real time. Do we want to, do we want to both check our screen time? Yes, I would. Let's play a fun game. Okay, I've got mine open. I've got my settings open. I have an iPhone. Yes. So on Android, you're going to have a similar feature. It's just called digital wellbeing, but it breaks it down very similarly. So you're going to go into settings. You're going to go to, I hope listeners are doing this in real time. Screen time. Okay, screen time. See all app and website activity. Well, so I have apps and website activity. Yes. Okay. So let's see. Daily average is seven hours and 55 minutes. It tells me my social apps, a total of 18 hours and 52 for the whole week for the whole week.

5:11Yes, for the week. Instagram takes up about nine hours and 48 minutes. TikTok is five hours and four minutes. Messages, two hours, 55 minutes. So it gives you a breakdown of each app. I do spend a lot of my time on TikTok. Notifications. My daily average is at 200. And that also gives you a breakdown of which apps you get the most notifications from. Yeah, I mean, my screen time's horrifyingly high. You're just not bad, actually. I don't want to say it for you. Oh, well, mine is five hours and one minute. That's my daily average on my phone. Three hours and 30 minutes is spent on safari. Am I a boomer? Am I just like searching up stuff all the time? I'm not using any social apps. No, it might be that you're whatever you're looking at, links out, like opens up in safari. Yeah. Okay. And then my next is my New York Times cooking app. My next is my workout app. And then messages. And I'm going to give messages 100% to my 10-year-old who uses my phone for messaging her friends. Okay. But see, like, this is where it comes back to this idea that it's such a bad thing to have a high screen time.

6:14And yes, it is. I'm just very chronically online. I need to double check that 18 hours of Instagram because that doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound right. I'm not using your phone. I don't know. But it's interesting because I think this is now sort of in part become. I can imagine when you're a kid, people talked about like how much time do kids spend on TV per week? We even talk about it now. And I've always thought of those numbers being crazy high. Like, people spend four or five hours a day on TV or eight hours a day on TV. But even just thinking of five hours a day on my phone, that feels like a lot. So there are ways that you can get into the details. Like you said, you can either kind of have a vibe check or you can actually just look it up on your phone. So that's pretty cool. Alright, so let's say somebody has just checked their screen time and they want to spend less time on their phone. Where would you recommend that they start? I think there's a range. I think if you're really bad like me and just constantly on your phone, I didn't expect this to work.

7:17I turned on this setting, which is on your notifications screens on your lock screen. I set it to count. So basically what it does is instead of showing like a full list of your notifications when they pop up, they accumulate at the bottom and all you see is a number. So four notifications, five, like depending on how many you have, the number will get higher and higher. And then you can swipe up and see a list. And I turned that on by accident because I was writing this story and I was just trying to get a sense of, you know, the different steps and how to turn everything on. And what it looks like. And I never turned it off. And I realized that what happened was I stopped getting distracted immediately when my phone would light up. So typically when I just have them appearing normally, I'll see I got a notification. And immediately my attention is just on my phone and tapping on the notification. And then suddenly I'm down this rabbit hole, right? Oh, let me check something else or let me keep scrolling or whatever I was doing in front of me is just an afterthought.

8:17And so with this count feature, I no longer get distracted because the notifications are not appearing as much. Sometimes I don't even realize that they're accumulating and that the number is getting higher until I'm like, oh, yeah, let me check my phone. And then I scroll up. So I think that's a good first step if you don't want to go too intense with it. Why do we get so many notifications on our phones? If you have notifications activated, is this purely app makers trying to get you to spend more time on their apps? 100%. I mean, they have, you know, their goals they want to hit their user retention rates. They want that high retention rate. They're taking advantage of how easy it is for us to get distracted. You know, an app like Amazon, you'll get a notification that something is on sale. And then suddenly you maybe don't even realize that you're opening it. And then suddenly you're like, oh, yeah, I mean, I don't need this thing that's on sale, but I've been meaning to look up this other thing that I've been wanting. And then suddenly you're browsing through Amazon for an hour.

9:18And so that's what makes it hard is I feel like we went from this era of useful notifications from these third party apps to suddenly flipping and then realizing, oh, we're not on their apps enough. How, how can we get everyone back on? And let's just send useless, most of the time they're useless notifications. They're jumping on a trend, right? I remember when it was like the Super Bowl, I got so many notifications from Uber Eats or DoorDash or GoPuff sending me these reminders. If you're having people over, make sure to order, you know, all the essentials. And so you just get this influx of notifications that you really don't need. But once you're on the app, who knows, you're suddenly sucked in. I am kind of like a blunt instrument type of person when it comes to apps and notifications, I basically turned them all off. And sometimes to my, my own and my family's detriment, like sometimes I've turned off the app notifications for messaging or for my daughter's gizmo watch.

10:20And then I miss something like really crucial. Is there a way to thread this needle? I'm not just like, I'm not doing, I'm not getting any notifications or I'm putting them all in like a little corral at the bottom of my phone. Like you were talking about versus letting the just the river of notifications come to you. Like is there some middle ground here? How do you do that? Yes. I wish I had the ability to just mute everything. I noticed Gen Z does that. They love do not disturb. They love do not disturb. I like this about them. Millennials could never were like, disturb me, please. So yeah, you can customize your notifications based on app. So you can either mute notifications from specific apps if you really don't need them. You can schedule notifications. So if you only want your notifications to appear altogether maybe twice a day, there's options to do multiple summaries, then it'll deliver all of the notifications to your phone at say 2 p.m.

11:26Oh, I like that. So like how do you do that? Do you go into again into the settings or something to settings to do that? Yeah, you can go into your settings, your notifications, and then there is a scheduled summary tab. So you can pick which apps that you want included in the summaries. So if there are specific apps that you really do want notifications for daily, but you don't want to miss them by completely muting them, you can add that to the list. So you're not inundated with just notifications constantly, and they're also grouped together. So it's also not as overwhelming. I like that having sort of a little control about when you get them. You can just choose ahead of time, and then you know, that's a nice way to solve it. Any other ways that you would advise people to manage sort of the notifications aspect, focus modes is a big one like that do not just serve feature or speaking in generalizations here Apple and Android have similar features. They're just going to work differently. As a whole with these modes, you can basically customize them to this specific event or theme for lack of a better word.

12:30So you have to not disturb that kind of encapsulates everything. If you want one for work, you can customize which apps you don't want notifications from. So that would be like social media. Maybe your message is because you don't want to be distracted by what the group chats are saying, or you can do one for when you're reading, you don't want specific notifications from apps to distract you from actually being able to read through a page. So you can get super granular with these and that way depending on which mode you want to use, it's just one button because it's all set up. So you don't have to dig through your settings, turn things off, mute certain notifications, like it's all set up for you, and you can just swipe down on on your lockscreen, tap whichever mode you want, and your phone is already set for it. Okay, so we're going to take a break in just a minute, but I just want to go over what we've already discussed. You, as a listener, can audit your screen time. You can go into the settings in your Apple phone or in your Android phone,

13:32and Apple you're going to be looking at the screen time feature, and in Android you'll be looking at the digital well-being feature, and you can go in there and see how much time you're spending on your phone every day, and where you're spending your time on that phone. And then the first step is to just start managing your notifications. If you can do the count feature on the lock screen, you can set up summaries, so you're just getting kind of batch notifications a couple times a day. You can turn on focus time, or you can feel like me and just turn them off completely. Next we are going to talk about some other ways to manage screen time. So stick around, we're going to get into it after the break. It's that time of year again. Fancy new phones were just announced, and your carrier says they can upgrade you for free. Like, free, free? Or am I just paying more monthly? And is there a multi-year contract involved? It's all kind of confusing.

14:32With visible, it's straightforward. Visible is the ultimate wireless hack, letting you bring your pay-off phone and pay one low monthly cost, taxes and fees included. The details of your wireless plan should be hard to understand and opaque. It should be easy to understand. It should be visible. Learn more at visible.com. If you're a parent of a teen or have teens in your life, it can be hard to figure out the right way to approach social media and technology. Ultimately, if you feel like your teens are ready, there are tools to help. Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections for what your teens see and who can contact them. Plus, time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. An Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online. At Instagram.com slash teen accounts. That's Instagram.com slash teen accounts. The Wirecutter Show is supported by Egg Life. Back to school, his parents managing a lot more moving pieces,

15:32and meals quickly become one more problem to solve. Egg Life Egg White Raps make it easy to sneak high-quality protein into your favorite meals and snacks. These wraps made from egg whites, not flour, are a total game changer. They're high in protein and low in carbs. Find egg life wraps chilling in the fridge at Aldi, Whole Foods, Croger, Target, Walmart, and more. Visit egglifefoods.com to find a retailer near you. Welcome back. Now that we have covered managing notifications, Brenda, I want to talk about managing ourselves. At least the time we spend on our phones. We recently did an episode about the brick. We mentioned that at the beginning of this episode. And that device locks you out of your apps. Some people actually buy dumb phones to limit distraction. I know this has been kind of popular for a few years. Is buying a separate device like a dumb phone or a brick really the best way to manage your own time on your phone?

16:39I would say to start with the built-in tools on your phone first. Dumb phones sound great in theory, but they can be very difficult to use in practice. A lot of them do come with a lot of the essential apps. So you can use it for text, for calls. There's local stories, so you can upload music to it. There's a camera. It's not a great one, but there's a camera. But the issue with dumb phones is just navigating your world day to day. And the minor things that you run into, for example, they don't have a browser. And so in the event that say you're at a restaurant and the menu is accessible through a queue. You're not going to be able to access that. If you need to access your banking app, there's no app store to download these third-party apps. It's a lot harder to exist in the real world now with a dumb phone than it used to be. And I learned that when I wrote the Blackberry story where I tried to revive an old Blackberry.

17:44And I ran into those exact issues where it was like I could not access those apps. That I just mentioned, like Uber or Google Maps was a struggle. You're in some ways just creating another problem for yourself. Right, like I'm thinking about like I went to a Jonas Brothers concert last month. And I was running late. My friends were already there. And so my one friend sent me the concert ticket through the ticket master app. And so it's like little minor things. Like you're going to have to prepare for that. And the only other solution is to carry your smartphone on you just in case. But then that defeats the purpose. Or you have to go all 90s or early odds and like print everything at home. Right. So you need to buy a printer and print out that ticket, print out the map quest directions. You know, all that good stuff. Oh my God, I remember. Map quest. Let's say that you just feel like you need a little bit of help.

18:46You've got this fancy, schmancy smartphone that can do so many things. But you want to kind of limit the way that you're using it. So what are your sort of easy answers for that? Yeah. So screen time limits or digital wellbeing limits where you can set specific amounts of time. And the amounts of time that you're allowed to be on each app per day and which days. So you can go into your settings into those apps. And you can say, I will only a lot myself. And it's only going to be on the weekends. That could really help because then you get basically frozen out of the app. Like you can't access it without seeing a pop up that says your limit is up for today. They are very easy to override. Which is why a lot of people do default to these other devices. Like a dump phone or brick. But I would start with that. And I wouldn't start with a lot of apps. I think using into it is the best way. So going into that screen time feature that we looked at earlier. Seeing that breakdown and maybe going for the apps that you see the highest screen time on is a good idea.

19:50Another one is assistive access, which I don't think that's talked about a lot. It's originally designed for people with cognitive disabilities. This is for iPhone specifically. I will say. What does it do? Basically you pick a specific set of apps. So in this case, you would pick maybe the essentials. So text, calls, maybe camera, and Gmail or your mail app. When you set it to assistive access, you get like four squares on your screen. And it's just those apps that you chose. And you can only tap into those apps. So you can't swipe up and access your home screen where all of your apps are available. Now you can access them by like triple tapping on the lock button to exit assistive access mode. Because again, you can override a lot of things. So it does require self control. But it just fully transforms what you see on the display in a way that's super simple and more restrictive. That way you're not going to get as distracted by all of these other apps.

20:54Because you only have the ones that you've set for yourself. Oh, I like that. That is a little bit like the brick in the sense that it's only giving you access to like the things that you have pinpointed that you want access to for that moment. What are some other things that people can do? Gray scale mode is also a good one. So when you go into your settings, you can, depending on iPhone or Android, you can set your phone to just completely look black and white. And so it's not as appealing. It's kind of like making it look boring. Yes. It's kind of like what you do with a narcissist. It's like gray rocking. Yes. A hundred percent. It's like suddenly this is not as appealing as a huge SUV. And it's actually terrible for me. Okay. So it makes it visibly less attractive. Yeah. Most of these apps just are visually appealing. And so it's easy to be sucked in because it's fun to look at. Right. And so suddenly scrolling through Instagram and seeing photos, you know. Is it actually make all the photos on Instagram, Gray? It does.

21:54So scrolling through Instagram when you can't see the photos in full color is not as fun. Okay. So if some of these built-in settings aren't working for someone, let's say they have a little bit of a self-control issue. I'm not speaking about anybody but myself. Yeah. Where you're getting past these sort of built-in controls that you've, you know, set up. What would you advise next? There are third party apps that you can download that are designed for this specific problem. One of them is focus friend. It's really cute. It's like you have this little, it looks like a pindo bean. And it's like your little friend that likes to knit. And so basically the longer you're off your phone, the longer it can knit. And if you decide to access an app outside of focus friend, then everything unravels.

22:55All of their work is gone and they get really sad. And so this plays on our emotion. So if you're a really empathetic person, then you're going to be like, I can't access TikTok right now because he has to keep knitting his little like socks. You know what I mean? There's like a gamification to it. If you want something more zen. Forest is another one. That one is similar to focus friend, but instead of a cute little cartoon character, it's like a tree species. And so the tree will grow more and more as you stay off of your phone. And then there's also focus keeper. That's like very old school like the Pomodoro method. So it's like focus sessions. And a Pomodoro, it's like a timer, right? It's like 25 minutes of focus and then you can take a break. Yes. You do this like little quiz in the beginning so it can gauge just how bad your focus capabilities are. And then it'll, you can also those set your own sessions depending on the length that you want.

23:57So you can do 15 or 25 and then yeah, you'll take like a five minute break, which is great for someone like me with if I know a task is going to take two hours, I suddenly get super overwhelmed, but doing it in chunks helps. There is one thing I do want to mention though, is that all of these apps are free to download and you can still access those features. They do require a paid subscription though, if you want the more advanced features. Let's say that none of these apps sound appealing to you or you just know that you're going to cheat your way out of them, I guess. And you need that extra physical barrier. Let's talk about the brick. We've talked about this on the show before. You have one, you love it. Please explain why this works for you because I need something that will physically lock me out of my phone. The brick has a magnet on the back. So it stays on my fridge in my kitchen. And it works for me because being able to physically separate myself from the one thing that unlocks my phone is a game changer in the sense that if I'm sitting there, say using these screen time features and I pick up my phone and I already have access to the unlock button to these apps like I can just tap 15 more minutes or ignore for today.

25:19I don't think about I just do it to have to think about getting up going to another room in my apartment and physically unlocking my phone creates this in between moment where I really have to think about it. Sometimes I'm just really lazy like sometimes I just don't want to do it. You know what I mean. But other times it really keeps you in check where you're like, oh my god, is it really that important that I have to stop what I'm doing and get up and walk over and unlock it. It's almost like a walk of shame. It's your brain. It is. One thing I will say that I have enjoyed about using the brick as we talked about at the beginning of the episode. I spend the most time on Safari and I brick Safari. The thing that I've noticed is that so many times during the day, I'll some question will pop up into my mind. I go to Safari and I try to figure it out. Right. And it does not allow me to do that. And so I just have to kind of sit with my thoughts for a little while and it's kind of nice. It's a nice experience. Rick, I, yeah, I will say I'm very chronicly online. I love knowing all of like the niche things that are going on.

26:23And using the brick for the first time, like my brain was just so clear and it was, it was great. I loved it. I noticed that I have to start breaking more and more apps because when I bricked all of like the social media apps suddenly I found Amazon interesting to browse through my roommate had to break her photos out because she found it interesting to browse through like you'll find the craziest things interesting because you don't want to sit with your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it gets you in the habit of being like, okay, it's okay. It forces you to not rely on your phone as much. It really does. Which is what we're just trying this whole episode is just trying to get you to be more comfortable. Hold on. That's exactly without, you know, living on your phone all the time. Brenda, this was great. I really enjoyed chatting with you today and we'll have you on again soon. Yeah, it's so much fun. Thank you. Will drop links to Brenda's advice in the show notes. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Garen and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman.

27:30Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson, original music by Dan Powell, Marion Luzano, Rowan Nemisto, Catherine Anderson and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor in chief. I'm Christine Sirclicet. Thanks for listening. It's that time of year again. Fancy new phones were just announced and your carrier says they can upgrade you for free. Like free free? Or am I just paying more monthly? And is there a multi-year contract involved? It's all kind of confusing. With visible, it's straightforward. Visible is the ultimate wireless hack, letting you bring your pay-off phone and pay one low monthly cost. Taxes and fees included. The details of your wireless plan shouldn't be hard to understand and opaque. It should be easy to understand. It should be visible. Learn more at visible.com.