essay

How to Kill Your Phone

You probably have a broken dumb addiction to your smartphone. You very well know the feeling. You normally find yourself responding to the notification, mindlessly typing and tapping having no goal or intention, swiping through apps, opening them as it has been a habit. Time is lost once anxiety sets in and you wonder what happened. You have tried all the ways popular of limiting usage of the phone while the common ones such as turning off notifications it didn’t help. Here is a way you can have this compulsion tamed.

Step 1: No second screen

This is a huge one. Your all-time favorite. When you introduce this to people their responses are like “you must be crazy”. You limit all apps to the home screen. You need to have no second screen and all applications only live on your dock. The advantage that comes along with this is that you are forced to search for the apps in order to find which one you are looking for rather than browse them. You keep the messages apps and native phone clearly visible on your dock as that how the phoned was designed originally to do. Literally, the rest moves to a folder named Apps which is placed in the dock where most of the apps you use commonly are found. If you feel you have so many application to an extent they can't fit in one folder, then you have too many apps. In iOS 7 having an upper limit to up to 135 apps in one folder that gives you more, than you could ever need.

Step2: Live and Love spotlight.

Scenario: You're busy browsing trying to find your app for the calendar to see the appointment for that day, and you get caught on the way by Facebook. It's badge which is shiny red beckons your attention. You click it and end up finding yourself watching babies and cats and after 10 minutes coming out for air you discover you already lost your attention in what you intended to do. Having your intention set makes use of spotlight for searching the app to use. This eradicates distraction as well as enables you to deliberately think why in the first place you are grabbing the phone.

Tips :

· Search for the app to use with Spotlight

· Use Spotlight to start apps that you use commonly.

· Limit the widgets you are using by having one swipe on the left when in Spotlight.

Step 3: No notifications

Remember in the first step how the messages and phone you left them open in the dock. Those are the only application you have notifications on. Since it is a phone, when someone texts or call, you can respond. All the other things are simply distractions.This way your folder for the app won't be having the red badge with random number notifications from a number of apps in it. This may sound extreme but you won't even receive alerts for a message when the phone is in vibrating mode. Neither do you see them on the screen as notifications? You only see the red badge calling when you unlock the phone. This results in you treating the phone text messages just like emails.

Step 4: Do not disturb

You don’t want to be interrupted by people randomly who you don’t even know. You will probably reach them back later or leave a message. In such a situation you just have to switch on the Do Not Disturb button only allow calls from your favorites. If this sounds too extreme for you, go for the option of only allowing calls from the contact list only. Repeated calls should be allowed in the case where there is an emergency which would be probably important than any of your time. The problem that is associated with DND is that it switches off. Even if turned on manually DND during mid-day turns off automatically when the time it is scheduled for is over.

Step5: The Technique of the Hair Band

For those of you out there who have no self-control and you absolutely need one more gate for prevention of the use of phone mindlessly. If all those techniques to kill the phone addiction you have the guts to back away from the phone, then this is not for you. Find a hair band which is stretchy have it wrap around your phone and put in the middle of the screen so that it’s possible for you to answer calls that are incoming but you are restricted from mindless use of the phone.

In conclusion, you may tend to think that new technology criticism basically mean s being a Luddite yet this is not the case. It's considered to be more of being aware of to make use of technology and the impacts that come along with that in life for better or worse. All these highlighted issues could be preventing your life from being ruined by smartphones and fixes that come along with them are about the individual, maybe friends and family share in life. Today Smartphone are being used in doing all types of different things.