How to Unhijack Your Mind from Your Phone
By: Tristan Harris
Tags: Time Well Spent, Productivity, iPhone, Unplug And Recharge, Tech

Why? Several reasons:

Opening these apps this way makes your phone automatically kick you back to the lock screen when you’re done (so you don’t accidentally get sucked in). It saves you three extra spots on your “minimalist” home screen. It’s actually faster to open them from Control Center than from anywhere else (because you can swipe up from any screen to get to it.)

Tip #4: Two Pages of Apps, and Hide the Candy Wrappers

Do you ever find yourself doing the following obsessive-compulsive behavior?

You unlock your phone You rapidly swipe through a few pages of colorful apps You rapidly swipe back through the same apps without opening anything Then … you lock your phone again. Huh?

We compulsively swipe through our phones without actually doing anything.

This strange quirk is driven partly by our evolutionary instincts for novelty-seeking. The surprise of colorful icons (visual triggers) and red badges (new notifications) flying by feeds our brains with subtle psychological rewards, becoming its own form of sideways slot machine.

Here’s one way to fix it: Limit your home screen to just two pages of apps, so there’s nothing to scroll through.

“Whoa,” you might be thinking, “just two pages of apps?”

“What am I supposed to do, put all my other apps into folders?” Actually, yes.

Put all your other apps into folders on the second page and don’t worry about stuffing too many apps together. If you’re following Tip #2, you won’t need these apps visible as separate icons anyway, because you’ll be typing their name instead.

Extra Tip: Keep the M&Ms, but Hide the Wrappers

Here’s an extra tip based on Google’s M&M’s kitchen experiment. As part of its generous employee perks and benefits, Google stocks its micro-kitchens with seductive snacks and candy so its employees can keep snacking during work. But they ran into a problem: employees found themselves eating more unhealthy snacks than they wanted.

So their behavioral science team tried an intervention based on two observations:

They noticed how M&M’s visual packaging triggered people’s unconscious impulse to eat.

They noticed that the M&M’s were too immediate to eat: employees grabbed snacks from the shelf without a conscious thought in between.

They made two interventions:

They put the candy into opaque, white porcelain jars with a lid (while putting alternatives like healthy fruit in see-through glass jars) They replaced the candy’s visual packaging with a neutral white placard and neutral font (e.g. “Peanut M & M’s” written in Comic Sans)

The first change created a brief gap, a moment of conscious choice, between the impulse and people’s actions. The second change dismantled the millions of dollars spent on advertising and conditioning M&M’s wrappers into our lives, and instead let employees choose for themselves.

The result? The new choice architecture reduced the consumption of M&M’s by 3.1 million calories in just seven weeks, in Google’s NY office alone — the equivalent of nine fewer vending machine-sized packages of M&Ms per employee. And they didn’t take any candy away, they just re-organized the existing choices.

We can do the same for apps on our home screens. Colorful app icons (the blue Facebook [F], or yellow-orange Instagram camera) visually trigger us to unconsciously consume just like candy wrappers. But instead of taking any candy away, we can just re-organize the choice architecture so we are in control — like this:

Move your visually triggering apps into folders on the second page (opaque jars with a lid) Within these folders, move the visually triggering icons into the second or third page embedded in the folder, so colors won’t be visible from outside.

For example, this won’t work:

But this could:

Overall, I set up my second page of folders with mostly color-neutral, gray icons and hide the colorful apps deeper inside. With my phone set up like this, downloading new apps is like adding new hidden functionality to my phone– but not new sources of concerns, new slot machines or trapdoor distractions.

Tip #5: Only Get Notified When *People* Need Your Attention

Put simply: Turn off all your notifications except when *people* (not apps or businesses) are trying to reach you.

We live in an Attention Economy. That means every app and website — whether it is a meditation app, the NYTimes, or an addictive game — is trying to get you to come back and spend more time. Companies literally have teams of people called Growth Hackers, whose job is to invent new reasons (notifications) and new persuasive tactics to bring you back. I know this because I studied with the lab at Stanford that invented many of these principles.

That’s why we wake up to screens that look like this, inundated with notifications.

Gloria Mark, one of the leading researchers on “interruption science” at UC Irvine, has shown that unrelated external interruptions cost us 23 minutes before we resume focus. And it appears that the more interruptions we get, the more it increases our internal clock rates for self-interruption– put simply, the more we get interrupted, the more we interrupt ourselves.

The only answer is to have our devices interrupt us less by turning off notifications.

But what about email notifications?

Turn them off. You will always have new email, why add clutter to your life on top of that? Turning it off will train people trying to reach you to text or call instead.

You may have noticed that many 3rd party email apps (like Mailbox, Entourage, etc) send a notification for each new email by default. This isn’t because it’s good or healthy for people, but because they are trying to get you into the habit of using their app instead of the default one.

But what about social media — what if I was tagged in a photo or miss an event?

Like email, why not check these sites and find out about important events or notifications on your terms — not theirs? Rest assured, they usually find a way to email you about them anyway.

But what about other people-related apps like Skype, Foursquare, Airbnb reviews, or messages on dating apps like OKCupid or Tinder?

For notifications that count as “people trying to reach you,” especially the ones that won’t come in through email, keep notifications on. I would turn the rest off.

But but but… what if I miss something?

We lived for decades in the modern world without smartphones in our pockets, trust that it will work out.

Tip #6: Unambiguous Vibrations

Today when our phone buzzes, it could be anything: we’ve been tagged in a photo, our mom’s texting us about an emergency, or someone followed you on Twitter. Our phone vibrates in a similar way for each type. This leads to the phenomenon of “phantom buzzing” — where we’re not sure if that person we’re expecting got back to us or not, and we start feeling vibrations in our pocket that didn’t even happen.

Turning off notifications will alleviate some of this. But it would also help to distinguish between when actual people want our attention and other kinds of notifications.

Luckily, Apple let’s you do just that with custom vibration signatures. Go to Settings > Notifications > Messages > Sounds > Vibration > “Create New Vibration” to tap a custom vibration rhythm for when someone sends you a message (I use a rapid, triple-vibrate pattern). This way, even when my phone is on silent I can clearly tell when a vibration meant that a person sent me a message.

Unfortunately for those of you who use third party messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat or Line as your primary way of communicating, Apple doesn’t let you set up custom vibrations for other apps.

This is exactly why we need to demand these as part of our “attention rights” from Apple and Google, who inadvertently act as the guardians of what kinds of freedoms we have or don’t.

Tip #7: Buy a Travel Alarm Clock or Charge Phone Outside

80% of smartphone owners report checking their phone first thing in the morning. And many of us don’t feel great about that. It sets up our thoughts and concerns for the day, and programs our minds to think about our lives in a very particular way.

While setting an alarm without unlocking your phone (tip #3) is helpful, it’s even better to use a separate alarm clock.

The best solution is to charge our phones outside the bedroom, and use a separate alarm clock as our daily alarm. You can buy many inexpensive options on Amazon, including a few under $10.

In conclusion…

While I believe these tips will help people tremendously, it’s just a start. What we really need is a whole new approach to the design of the screens we live by– to make them truly livable and designed to help us spend time well.

Both Apple and Google could do a lot more to make our phone’s default settings reflect how people really want to live. Imagine if we lived in a world where our phones and the Internet were designed to make our darwinian instincts work for us, instead of against us. Imagine if these kinds of settings were the default, not something only a few people knew about.

Time Well Spent is about making that happen, let’s create that conversation.