Good article on the BBC website recently entitled ‘Are you ready to break up with your phone?’
It included some top tips from Catherine Price who wrote the book How To Break Up With Your Phone after having a baby and realising one day that the baby was watching her and she was watching her mobile!
“Breaking up with your phone does not mean dumping your phone or throwing it under a bus, it just means taking a step back to create a relationship that is actually good for you. It’s becoming friends with your phone.”
“I realised I didn’t want that to be her impression of a human relationship, but I also didn’t want it to be the way that I was living my own life,” she said.
In her book, Ms Price lists a 30-day plan to reclaim this “friendship”. Her top tips include:
- Turn off all the notifications you can bear to. Just leave the ones you actually want; for me that is phone calls and text messages because they are real people trying to contact me, in particular, in real time – plus my calendar and maps
- rearrange your home screen so that it only contains apps that have a practical purpose that are not tempting. Your home screen should not have email, or social media, or the news or a dating app, or games. Put them into a folder on an interior page so you can’t see their icons, you have to actively open them
- Get your phone out of your bedroom. You will need to have something on your bedside table that takes the place of the phone… like a book. When you go to reach for that phone you will encounter the book instead
- Get a standalone alarm clock. If your phone is your alarm clock you are guaranteeing that your phone will be the first thing you interact with in the morning
- There is a plug-in called Facebook Demetricator, which stops you seeing you how many times your post has been “liked”. You still may go back to see that people have liked your post, but you’re not going to be checking compulsively to see when 17 gets to 20 and 25 gets to 30 – it can help break that habit.
