In this guide, we will be learning on how to make your phone a less distractive, and also how to reduce the time that you spend on your phone. You only need to follow a few steps, and it can take less than twenty minutes to make your phone a “minimalist” one. I came up with the name “minimalist phone” based on the minimalism philosophy, “saying no to things we don’t like,”.
Step 1 :- Why do you use phone ?
This is the most important and hardest step, figuring out what you want your phone to do. For me personally, I use my phone three things
- Sending and Receiving WhatsApp
- Listening to music
- Reading E-Books
This is what is important for me at this time, these can change as per your needs and requirements. You can add your calendar, to-do app, even mails if you want.
Step 2:- Saying no to things we don’t like
Now you have decided your phone use case and all the apps that you require, now you need to delete the apps that does not meet the criteria. Personally, I have deleted most of my apps on my phone, including the browsers, YouTube and search engines. If I need to search anything on the internet, will have to use my laptop and also for watching YouTube too and not my phone.
If you are using android phone then you can use this tool called “Universal Android Debloater” that allows you to uninstall every application that cannot be uninstalled using your phone default way. If you don’t want to install the tool, you can also use ADB tools to uninstall the unwanted apps, such as your browser.
Don’t worry if you are using an iPhone, you can still logout from the services if you are not able to uninstall it completely. If not, you could always use your phone on focus mode that your phone provides and select the apps that you require.
Step 3:- Minimizing Distractions
Even though your phone is minimal by deleting all the apps the you don’t need and only sticking with essentials. These essential apps can also distract you, when you are working. This is just the basics things like managing your notifications.
One step head of this is compartmentalization, where you use certain devices/profiles for specific tasks. For example nowdays both android and I guess iPhone’s do provide the feature of using different user profiles. So its best in practice to create three profiles.
- work
- Family
- Play
You can increase or decrease the number of profiles as per your need, but I’ll suggest that the minimum is two user profiles. Each profile only contains the apps the related to the profile. For example you don’t need your work email in your family user profile likewise not having family groups inside your work profile.
This helps you to maintain and organise everything and not get rumpled up and use work profile while you are at work so that your family groups can’t disturb you while working and vice-versa.
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