How to use your phone less, without deleting everything
Deleting every app works for about a weekend. Then you need a map, or a message from your sister, or the bank, and they all come back. Here's what helps that you can actually live with, and what the research does and doesn't say about it.
Why willpower keeps losing
Most of the time you pick up your phone, you didn't decide to. Your hand did. A moment of boredom, a pause in a conversation, the first second of a task you don't want to start, and the phone is already unlocked.
That's a habit doing what habits do, and the phone is unusually good at building them: it's always within reach, it offers relief from any small discomfort in a second, and it never runs out of new things. Trying to out-decide that a hundred times a day is a losing game. What works better is changing the setup so there are fewer decisions to make.
Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life.
James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter
Add a little friction
Small obstacles change behavior more than they should. You don't need to delete the apps that eat your time. You need to make them slightly harder to open than they are now.
- Move them off the Home Screen. Touch and hold the app, tap Remove App, then Remove from Home Screen. It stays in the App Library, so you can still find it, but your thumb can't land on it by reflex.
- Log out. Having to type a password is a surprisingly good moment to ask whether you really want to.
- Set an App Limit. In Settings → Screen Time → App Limits, give the worst offenders a daily allowance. You can tap past it, and that's fine. The point is the pause.
This is the same idea that makes habits stick, run in reverse: make the thing you want to do less of a little more of a hassle. There's more on that in how long it takes to form a habit.
Put it out of reach
Kostadin Kushlev, Jason Proulx and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia ran a two-week experiment with 221 people. For one week they kept their phones close with alerts on. For the other they turned alerts off and kept the phone out of reach. During the alerts-on week, people reported more inattention and hyperactivity, and more inattention went with lower productivity and well-being. They presented the results at the CHI conference in 2016.
You may also have read that just having your phone on the desk, switched off and face down, drains your brainpower. That comes from a 2017 study by Adrian Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas, which got a lot of attention. Later attempts to repeat it have been mixed, and some found no effect at all. A 2024 meta-analysis by Douglas Parry, pooling dozens of studies, found limited support: a small effect on working memory and nothing clear elsewhere. So it may matter a little. It isn't the dramatic effect the headlines described.
The practical upshot is the same either way. When you want to focus, or sleep, or be with someone, put the phone in another room or a bag. Not face down beside you, where your hand can still find it.
While fireworks are going off, nobody looks at the starry sky.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms
Batch your notifications
Every notification is an invitation to pick the phone up, and once it's in your hand, you rarely put it down after one thing.
Nicholas Fitz, Kostadin Kushlev, Dan Ariely and their colleagues tested this in a field experiment published in Computers in Human Behavior in 2019. People who got their notifications in batches three times a day reported feeling more attentive, more productive, less stressed and more in control of their phones than people who got them as usual. Batching every hour made little difference. And people who got no notifications at all didn't do better: they felt more anxious and more worried about missing out.
So the goal isn't silence. It's fewer interruptions. On an iPhone, Settings → Notifications → Scheduled Summary does this for you: choose the apps that can wait, pick a few times a day, and iOS gathers their notifications into one delivery. Leave messages from people on, so the things that matter still reach you.
A fair disclosure: Dailies is a phone app, and it sends notifications. It's built to be one of the small ones. You choose how many quotes a day and the hours they're allowed to reach you, and there's no feed to scroll when you open it. If it's one too many, it goes in the summary like anything else.
Turn the color off
Apps are colorful on purpose. Red badges and bright icons are designed to catch the eye. Switching your screen to grayscale makes all of it a bit duller, and duller is easier to put down.
There's some evidence for this. Alexander Holte and Richard Ferraro at the University of North Dakota had college students switch to grayscale for a week, and reported in The Social Science Journal in 2020 that their daily screen time dropped by roughly 40 minutes on average. A later study by Holte and colleagues found a smaller drop, around 20 minutes, and no change in how often people unlocked their phones. Modest, then, but real, and it costs nothing to try.
On an iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters, switch it on and choose Grayscale. To flip it on and off quickly, set Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut to Color Filters, then triple-click the side button.
Have something else to reach for
Most phone checks are about filling a gap: waiting for the kettle, the bus, the meeting to start. Take the phone away and the gap is still there, and the urge with it.
So decide in advance what goes in the gap. A paperback in your bag. A notebook. Looking out of the window, which is underrated. Or nothing at all for thirty seconds, which feels strange at first and then, after a week or so, quite nice.
When distractions are rare, the smallest joy has a flavor you never knew.
Émile Souvestre, An Attic Philosopher in Paris
And if your phone use is tangled up with something heavier, if you're reaching for it to get away from anxiety or a low mood, that's worth talking about with a doctor or someone you trust. The phone may be the symptom rather than the problem.
Questions
How can I use my phone less without deleting apps?
Make the apps a little harder to reach: move them off your Home Screen, log out, or set a daily App Limit in Screen Time. Keep the phone in another room when you want to focus, batch your notifications with Scheduled Summary, and try grayscale. Small obstacles work better than willpower.
Does grayscale really reduce screen time?
A little. In a 2020 study by Alexander Holte and Richard Ferraro, college students who switched to grayscale for a week cut their daily screen time by roughly 40 minutes on average. A later study by Holte and colleagues found a smaller drop of around 20 minutes.
Should I turn off all my notifications?
Probably not. In a 2019 field experiment, people who got their notifications in batches three times a day felt more attentive and less stressed, while people who got none at all felt more anxious about missing out. Fewer, batched notifications seem to work better than none.
Does having your phone nearby hurt your concentration?
Possibly a little. A well-known 2017 study suggested that a phone on the desk reduces available brainpower, but later attempts to repeat it have been mixed, and a 2024 meta-analysis found only a small effect on working memory. Having alerts on and the phone within reach does seem to make people more distracted.
What is Scheduled Summary on iPhone?
An iOS setting that collects notifications from the apps you choose and delivers them together at times you set, instead of one by one. Find it under Settings, then Notifications, then Scheduled Summary. Messages from people and time-sensitive alerts can still come through straight away.
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Start today with something good.
Set it up once. Dailies takes it from there.
