You and I probably share a habit: picking up the phone for one quick check, only to realize half an hour has gone. It’s sneaky, it’s addictive, and it chips away at our focus. I reached a breaking point when I saw my screen time rise to 5-6 hours a day, and I knew I had to fight back.
I intentionally made my phone “dumb.” It involved stripping away everything that pulled me in until it felt almost boring. It wasn’t easy, but it finally stopped me from wasting hours on my phone.
Start by uninstalling most of your apps
Less choice, more focus
Every time you unlock your phone, your favorite apps are right there, staring back at you. You tap one, switch to another, and before you know it, you’re doomscrolling through endless feeds without even realizing how much time has passed.
So, the first thing I did was uninstall most of the apps from my phone. Social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and X were the first to go. I also got rid of YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, and those mindless time-killing games. For the ones I couldn’t remove, I disabled them so they wouldn’t appear in the app drawer. I even went as far as turning off Google Discover to avoid getting pulled into endless content suggestions.
If you don’t want to stop using social media apps entirely, it’s best to use them in your phone’s web browser. The experience is much worse there, so you’re far less likely to spend hours scrolling.
With only essential apps left, even when I opened my phone there wasn’t much to do beyond checking photos, replying to messages, or handling banking tasks. The constant urge to refresh, compare, or consume vanished almost immediately.
Turn off all notifications except calls and messages
Finally, peace without the constant ping
Even when you try your best to use your phone less, notifications can still shatter your self-control. The anxious question of “what could that alert be?” is enough to make you pick up the phone, and before you know it you’ve lost another twenty minutes. I felt that cycle over and over, and I’m sure you’ve been there too.
Those few essential apps you keep, whether it’s WhatsApp, Spotify, or your favorite food delivery app, can still quietly steal your attention with a little ping or banner. Even the Play Store and Galaxy Store do this by recommending apps and games.
So I went ahead and disabled alerts for everything. The only ones I left were calls, text messages, and voicemail—after all, it’s still a phone. If you don’t want to go app by app, you can also enable Do Not Disturb and set exceptions for calls and messages. At first, you might feel a little anxious and check your phone out of habit, only to find nothing waiting for you. And that’s the point.
Make the home and lock screen completely boring
So dull, it’s almost meditative
Even without notifications, your phone’s lock screen can still grab your attention. Depending on how you’ve set it up, it might flash stock updates, breaking news, or convenient app shortcuts.
So I stripped everything away. No widgets. No shortcuts. No animations. Even the wallpaper is now a flat black. My lock screen looks almost identical to the always-on display: just the date and time, nothing else. To make it even less tempting, I turned off fingerprint unlock so that every single unlock requires typing a PIN. It’s a tiny bit annoying, but trust me, it works.
I followed the same approach to the home screen. One page only, no widgets, no unnecessary app shortcuts. If I want an app, I have to search for it. You can also skip the manual work and try minimalist launchers, like Minimalist Phone, Before Launcher, Olauncher, and more.
Enable grayscale to kill the color temptation
Goodbye, candy-colored phone addiction
You know how every app icon and notification is designed to look like candy for your brain? All those reds, blues, and yellows aren’t an accident—they’re engineered to pull your attention. One surprisingly effective way to dull that pull is to flip your phone into grayscale mode.
At first, it feels weird. The whole screen suddenly looks like an old black-and-white TV or one of those e-readers. But without those bright cues, your brain stops treating the phone screen like a slot machine.
If you can’t stop yourself from browsing Instagram or Twitter even in your phone’s web browser, this trick should help. I even added a grayscale shortcut to the Quick Settings panel so I can easily disable it when I genuinely need to view something important, like a photo for work or a map.
Living with a phone after making all these changes wasn’t easy at first. But seeing my screen time drop from 5-6 hours a day to barely an hour made it worth it. Suddenly, I had more time to work, read, and actually live. If you’re thinking about trying the same thing, it’s best to start small. Make the above changes one at a time and before long, you’ll notice your screen time decreasing and feel more in control.
