how I reduced my screentime by 80% (guide)

[Music] this is the modern dump phone it's a system to help you take back your attention and kill your screen time as someone who's gone down the dumb phone rabbit hole and looked into flip phones really the best dump phone is the phone that you already have you just need to customize it to make it work for you and not against you old school dump phones and flip phones aren't really that easy to use in the modern age because a lot of restaurants require you to scan the QR code Disneyland requires you to download their app and more more concert tickets are going digital only this allows you to retain the utility of a smartphone without the downsides of compulsive usage or infinite scrolling to show you what I mean let me walk you some of the basic features so you have a super minimalistic lock screen I've turned off all notifications except for people reaching out to me once you unlock your phone you also have a super minimalistic setup that doesn't distract you you can actually make websites like YouTube Instagram less addicting so for example on my YouTube I've removed thumbnails so it's more minimalistic and when I click on a video there's also no recommended videos in the sidebar so I'm less likely to get distracted so if you seen my previous videos on this this is an updated version with with way cheaper apps no subscription fees and some updated features in this video I'm going to show you how to set it up for less than $10 on both IOS and Android if you want to skip to the setup you can just click on this time stamp right here but I also want to talk about the benefits of having a setup like this for almost two years now a few years ago I really struggled with the problem of Doom scrolling and spending like way too much time on uh YouTube rabbit holes on my phone like it really negatively impacted my sleep productivity social life and achieving all my goals there'll be so many days where I feel like the entire day is wasted because I just spent too much time on my phone or I felt like my attention span was really negatively impacted but after reading a few books on this like including books like Atomic habits I realized that it's really important to set up your environment to make it work for you and not against you and so that's what inspired me to really look for the optimal phone setup and over the past one to two years I've made a few modifications but really the core Concepts stay the same where the phone has only one purpose and it's to work for me and not against me and if I find that it's getting more addicting then it's time to put on more restrictions on my phone and now that I've been using this for a while I feel like I really have a healthy relationship with my phone where a lot of times when I'm going out I don't even need to really bring it and now when I go running or when I go work out I don't even bring my phone I just bring my iPod Nano and I just listen to music over there so I would highly recommend you to try this setup it's brought me such a high return on investment where it only took maybe like half an hour an hour to set up and it has saved me maybe hundreds if not thousands of hours over the past 1 to two years and if you find yourself spending way more time than you would like on your phone it's really not your fault if you look at app designs today like really most of them are designed to do just one thing and that's to increase the amount of time you spend on their platforms to give you an example the other day I found one of my old phones from 6 years ago and when I booted it up it still had all the old apps uh without being updated and it was crazy to see how much app designs have evolved into a less functional form like let me show you what my fitness pal looks like six years ago this is my fitness pal which is a calorie tracking app and six years ago it had a super functional UI with just three tabs your home your calories for the day and your profile but today this is what my fitness P looks like it has a bunch of dopamine widgets that is trying to make the app more engaging there's an infinite scrolling feed even Google Maps today has an infinite scrolling feed of places recently I even saw an article that said how the comments on Instagram and Tik Tok change based on what they think you will like the most or what you would engage with the most so they're literally changing the content to make it more addicting it's not that social media is inherently bad like personally I've gained a ton of value from YouTube it's really the dose that makes the poison it's only when you start to use social media compulsively and you start to watch or consume content that isn't really adding anything to your life that it becomes harmful and so today it's more important than ever to First find apps that aren't trying to addict you and two to set up your phone in a way that makes your phone work for you and not against you and that's what the modern Dum phone is so yeah let me show you how you can set it up on both IOS and Android I'm going to show a list of the apps right here with pricess list out if you just want to go and set it up for yourself but basically basically there's five main steps to make it a functional modern dumb phone the first thing you want to do is to delete apps go through all your apps see which ones are trying to addict to usually they're ones with algorithmic feeds or they're the ones that you're most addicted to or check compulsively if they're social media apps like YouTube uh Reddit Instagram I would also recommend deleting that and only accessing that through the browser and I'll show you how to optimize the browser to make those apps less addicting the second thing you want to do is to turn off all your notifications so I pretty much turn off all the notifications except for messages like I don't really need to have any news updates or any push notifications from any app really so I just turned them all off you kind of have to do that manually in settings for both IOS and Android after you've done that then you want to optimize the browser so a lot of people don't know this but you can actually install extensions on your phone both on IOS and Android and on iOS you can only install them on Safari and on Android you have to download Firefox and all them there I recommend the app called social Focus which cost $3. 99 on iOS and it's free on Android but with this app it gives you some basic modifications for every social media site like YouTube Reddit Instagram Facebook even LinkedIn I think where you can remove the algorithmic feed you can remove like recommended content and they make it more functional and less addicting for YouTube specifically the same developer has another app called untrap for YouTube which I've also bought but it allows you to do stuff like remove the thumbnail or remove recommend videos from the sidebar like this is what my YouTube looks like on my phone it's just a list where I'm unlikely to fall into a binging rabbit hole but now that you've optimized social media info the next step is to customize your home screen so personally I like using a launcher that makes the apps into a list versus icons because it's a little less stimulating and there's no notification badges and to do this there's two different apps on IOS and Android on iOS I recommend the app dummy so previously in a different video I recommended this app called blank spaces but it's actually a subscription model and it's more expensive so dumy is only $7 as a onetime payment and I think it works even better on Android you want to install this launcher called o launcher and it's free so yeah it's pretty much free everything is pretty much free on Android personally I just like to have a minimalistic feed of just the apps that I want to use on my phone so there are like books music messages settings the browser notes and maps and for maps I don't use Google Maps I use Apple Maps just because it doesn't have an algorithmic feed and any app that has an algorithmic feed I'm like very likely to delete and try to find an alternative for like even for tracking calories I don't use my fitness palette anymore because it's just so bloated I use this one called macro Factor if you're interested after you've customized your home screen and lock screen your phone will will pretty much look and operate like a dum phone right now but the main thing that tied this whole thing together for me and really killed my screen time was to create a schedule for social media one of the biggest differences between a actual Dum phone and a smartphone is that on a smartphone you can fall down many different rabbit holes through the browser and social media so it wasn't until I blocked the browser and social media on a schedule that I really developed healthier habits with using my phone and dram automatically killed my screen time you can do this with an app called screen Zen it's available on both IOS and Android and it's free and you can just block the browser during certain times of the day where you don't want to be accessing or looking stuff up there's also a different app called burnout bodyy on iOS that does the same thing and it's also completely free if you want to check that out but for me what I did is that I block social media and the browser during the times when I want to be working or during the times when I don't want to be using my phone so they're like in the entire morning and in the entire evening and also the when I'm doing deep work so I really only have maybe an hour or so of social media access on my phone that I use day to day I would recommend setting up a schedule versus doing a time limit because when you have a time limit or you have one of those apps that make you pause for a few seconds you still have the habit of checking compulsively before knowing that it's blocked but if you have it on a schedule like you know you only can access between uh the hours of like 12:00 p. m.

to 7:00 p. m.