How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly (Part 1)
We're going to start off by taking a look at what's on our phones - a quick gander tells me that I have 183 apps installed on my phone. From my screen time app (which we'll talk about later) I can see that I used 38 of them last week - and a majority of those apps I only used for a few minutes. We all have the apps we use the most on our phones but for now we're going to look at those apps I didn't use - because if I'm only using 38 of those 183 apps on my phone, what are the other 145 apps doing on my phone?
To see how many apps you have on your phone will differ depending on what type of phone you have. For the iPhone go to Settings, then General, then click About and then look for a line that says "Applications" that will show you how many apps that you have installed. For Android head over to the your google play dashboard at google.com/settings/dashboard and scroll down to the play store section and you can see your total number of apps.
Clutter is one of those things that defines so many us with ADHD - and what we're looking at right now on our phones is digital clutter. I know that I'll often browse the app store for a particular app, but along the way I'll download 2-3 other ones because they looked cool - okay, I'll be honest, it's usually more like 5-7 and sometimes higher. And sure I tell myself that I'll find time to go and look at these apps later, but that rarely actually happens. The clutter builds up quickly.
You may be asking, "so what? it isn't like digital clutter is actually taking up any real space" - and that is true - you could have a 1000 apps on your phone and it would take up as much physical space as my 157 app - (yeah, that's right after I looked up my number the first time, I went and deleted 26 apps on my phone cause I got distracted while writing) - The point here is that it creates clutter that makes it harder to use your phone. They take up mental space when we're looking at our phones, they make it harder to find what we're looking for and they make it harder to organize our phones.
It's time for a purge. First we're going to open up our phone and look for the apps that we've never even opened and delete those first - "but but but I wanted to check that one out." Okay, fair. You can keep it if you go and schedule time that you are going to check it out. And I mean really schedule it - put it in your calendar, add that on Sunday you're going to be looking at your new meal prep app - give yourself the time you actually need to try it out. I'm sure I've downloaded and deleted plenty of apps that would have improved my life had I given them the time to actually set them up. But if I never actually check them out they don't need to be on my phone.
Next we're going to delete the apps we don't use anymore - I had an entire folder of apps labeled "Focus" that I hadn't opened in months, and you know what, all those apps did was make me feel guilty for not using them. They were great when I used them but my work flow has changed and I don't need them anymore, so into the trash they go.
The hardest apps to delete from this category are the ones that you've paid for - because here you get that sunk cost fallacy, where because you've already put the money in you've got to keep it. But really if you aren't using it and can't realistically see yourself using it in the future then there really is no point in keep it around. If you end up needing it in the future you can always redownload it.
Finally we've got to examine one last category and those are our time wasters. These are the apps that suck you in and don't give anything back - these are mostly going to be social media and games. Let me start off by saying that you don't have to delete all of these. We're going to be looking at some screen time restrictions in a bit that can help with these, but I think it's still a good idea to take a look at which of these apps you might want to get rid of. There are things on our phones that we know we just shouldn't have. I once played the game 2048 for three hours straight - I would have played longer if my battery hadn't run out. Games like that are easily something I just shouldn't have on my phone.
I also got rid of any games that I was playing too frequently - these tend to be the ones that required me to at least log in once a day to get those bonuses - or required me to log in several times a day to get the best bonus.
This doesn't mean I don't have any games on my phone. Occasionally I like to be able to have a short distraction. Currently I'm playing a puzzle game called Picture Cross. I'm okay with this one because it is something I can just put down whenever I need to and it isn't going to completely pull me in. You may choose to have no games on your phone or you may have a couple that really work for you. You've just got to decide what works best for you. If you're finding yourself heading to the restroom and spending 30 minutes each visit because of a particular app - maybe uninstall that app. Or if can bring yourself to uninstall it yet, maybe make a rule about no phones in the bathroom.
The reason we wanted to start with our app purge is that it makes these next parts easier. First we want to start organizing our phone so that when we pick it up we're not tempted into doing things we're not supposed to be doing. On my first page of apps I currently have 4 apps (not including my app bar that has my camera, phone, messaging and calendar app on it) - these four apps are the apps that I want to encourage myself to use more. My first app is Notion which I use for my to-do list and planning, next is Medium which I use for reading, next I have Drafts for note taking and then I have my Reminders app.
The point here is that you want the starting point on your phone to have the apps that help you the most.. If I had Twitter on my home page it's more than likely that I'd be tempted to open up Twitter every time I unlocked my phone. Remember we're trying to make our phones work for us here so we want to design the experience we have when we pick up our phones and look for an app - is that experience one that is going to lead us to distraction or is it going to be able to keep us on task?
As for our other apps, there are a number of of different ways that we can approach how to organize them - I like to organize my apps by the utility that they serve and put them into folders, that way I can move the apps I want to use frequently closer to the front and the ones like games and social media further to the back.
After my first page I have apps that I still want to have quick access to, so things like my podcast app, my sleep apps and my photos. After that I have a page with a lot of my tool apps - these are all in folders, so apps for ordering food, writing and also the apps I have on there just for my kids. Finally I have a fourth page that has my games, my social media, and my other entertainment apps. The whole idea here is that if it's out of sight, it's out of mind.
If I want to look for a time waster app I have to really be looking for it. And protip here, on the iPhone you can swipe down and open a search menu that will allow you to just quickly type in the apps name and open it from there. Great for when you can't remember where you put your Chipotle app but really need a burrito. And double protip, you can disable search from being able to find things like Instagram so that you really do have to work at getting to those apps you want to limit.
Now that we're nice an organized let's talk a little about alarm fatigue.
The easiest way to think of alarm fatigue is the story of the boy who cried wolf. When we hear alarms over and over again throughout the day they start losing their meaning, especially if all the alarms aren't that important. I remember years ago I'd always answer my phone if it rang, even if I didn't recognize the number, but in the last few years I've been so inundated by spam calls that if I don't recognize the number I rarely answer. My brain has been trained that answering my phone usually doesn't have a payout. When we've got too many pings and dings going on with our phone we start losing the signal of the important ones because of all the noise.
The first thing that we are going to want to do with our phone is start disabling all those notifications. On both iOS and Android you have options to turn off all of your notifications, although you're probably going to want to still have some notifications like text messages. You can find out how to do this here:
The question you're going to want to ask of yourself is which notifications are you still going to want to be receiving? Here are a few notifications you should automatically turn off, all social media and games, anytime you have an incoming email and anything that pings you for no reason. So that going to be most of you notifications.
I have notifications on for
Text messages
Both my reminder Apps
my calendar app
and also for an app that reminds me to drink water throughout the day
and that's about it. There are a couple like my travel apps that I'll leave on but they usually don't ping me unless it's actually important. What we want to make sure we're getting rid of is all those notifications that aren't actually useful for us. Those notifications direct our attention and so we want to make sure we're only getting the ones we actually want to get.
While I do appreciate getting texts from friends, I don't necessarily want to be getting texts all day long while I'm trying to concentrate on work. I also don't need my phone dinging when I'm trying to record a podcast. So I make frequent use of the Do Not Disturb feature on my phone. There are also a lot of Do Not Disturb settings that can make it even more useful. I like setting up certain times of day that my phone automatically goes into Do Not Disturb so that I won't forget to set it before I start working on something - but I also don't want to make myself completely unreachable in case their is an emergency with my kids, so I also have it set to let my wife's calls through and also repeat phone calls through.
While we're talking about disabling notifications we should also be looking at limiting the number of badges that we see on our phone - you may ask, what's a badge? It's just that little red dot in the corner of an app telling you that it has some kind of message that you "need" to check. When you're turning off your notifications you should have the option to also turn off the badges and I'd highly recommend doing that because badges are just another way to draw in our attention when we open up our phones. Those red little circles are designed to draw our eyes and when we see that we have 247 unread emails it is only going to make us feel guilty and we're going to get the same effects from alarm fatigue as we try and ignore them.
Both the iPhone and now Android devices have a baked in screen time trackers to their OS's - Screen Time on iOS and on the latest Android OS, Digital Wellbeing - and I'll be very honest, at this point I don't know that much about Digital Wellbeing, so I'm mostly going to be talking about Apple's Screen Time.
The first obvious bonus of using a screen time tracker is that you can find out how much you are actually using your phone - it's probably a lot more than you think, because every time you pick it up for 15 minutes throughout the day adds up. The trackers can also show you how many times you've unlocked up your phone throughout the day and then what your first app that you've used is after you unlocked your phone. Looking at my score from last week, I had a total of 555 pickups with an average of 79 per day and my most opened app what my messaging app, so apparently I mostly use my phone for texting, I'm okay with that. My second most commonly first opened app is Twitter - I'm less okay with that, so that probably means I have some things to work on there.
While seeing the trends you have for use on your phone is important and even better feature here is that you can set screen time limits on your phone. You can do this either through categories or through specific apps. You'll have to decide which approach is best for you - but if say you decide to have a 30 minute limit for Facebook, a 30 minute limit for Instagram and a 30 minute limit for Twitter then really you've given yourself an hour and half hall pass on social media - I'm not going to tell you that's too much, but for me it would be. At the same time you want to be realistic with your limits - so spend some time figuring out what a good amount would actually be for yourself and don't worry if you find out that you've gotten wrong you can always change it.
I've also got my phone set to start locking itself down at 7:30 pm so that I can be sure that I'm getting off my phone at night - and you may be saying to yourself, "but that's so early!?" and it is, but what am I really doing with my phone after 7:30 that's important? I don't want to be working at that time of night and so usually I'm just scrolling TikTok for way too long. I've got other things I want to do in my evening that I really don't need my phone for. After my kids go to bed is usually the only time I have alone with my wife and I'd rather spend that time actually being present with her than spending it mindlessly on my phone.
But on that note, I'd also like to suggest another idea, which is that when you set up these time restrictions they are going to ask you to enter in a password that you have to enter if you want to get additional time - this is a great way to create some resistance from just staying on an app forever, but as people that have a little difficulty with impulse control it is really easy to just pop in that password and keep doing whatever you were doing - so what we can do here is have someone we trust set up that password. Now I don't suggest that lightly because I understand that giving up control of your phone can be very anxiety-inducing, but if you are having trouble staying with your screen limits that you've set this is a way to make it even harder to get around them, just don't set it so that your phone locks you out of important features when you might not have that person around.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Purge any apps that you don't need on your phone - both unused apps and also apps that pull you in too much.
Organize your apps so that your most useful apps are easy to open and your distracting apps are hidden.
Turn off most of your notifications and make use of your Do Not Disturb feature.
Check out your phone's screen time feature and set some sensible restrictions on how much time you are spending on your phone.
Mentioned in this Episode
How to Turn off Notifications
