How to Get 1 Hour of Your Life Back Every Day: Smart Smartphone Tactics
10 little nudges improve life by reducing stressful, wasted time on your phone
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We can argue for hours on social media whether excessive smartphone use is an addiction or not, but since the average person spends 20% of their life on their phone—risking additional anxiety, depression, and ultimately loneliness — our time might be better spent figuring out how to recover just a fraction of that valuable commodity for healthier pursuits.
A new study tested several ways to reduce wasted time on smartphones, revealing 10 little nudges that generated a full hour of time recovered each day for the average participant.
The tests involved university students who employed, on average, about eight of the suggested nudges for a few weeks. Compared to a control group, they not only gained free time but also reported improved sleep quality.
The nudges, in order of effectiveness:
- Reduce notifications
- Enable screen-time tracking
- Keep your phone away while sleeping
- Set your phone screen to grayscale
- Hide social media apps
- Make your phone less accessible
- Make your phone harder to unlock
- Change your display settings
- Move phone tasks to computers
- Leave your phone at home when you can
“Most of the participants spent four to five hours per day on their phones,” says study leader Jay Olson, PhD, a researcher in psychology at McGill University in Canada. “The intervention reduced this by about an hour per day, sometimes freeing up the equivalent of an entire full-time work week per month.”
That’s plenty of time to vastly improve your well-being by, say, going for a daily walk, maybe pursuing some entirely new goal that gets you out of your comfort zone, or otherwise adopting a healthy new habit. And if you silence your phone during these new pursuits, you’re in double-bonus territory.
