How to turn your phone into a “simple” phone

The smartphones we carry with us everywhere are wonderful little devices, capable of entertaining, communicating and communicating with the rest of the world – but they can also be incredibly distracting. If you decide that your phone is taking up too much of your time and attention, there are plenty of ways to make it less distracting.

Sometimes referred to as the simplicity of a phone, this can cover everything from turning off a few notifications to buying a brand new phone that has been designed with minimalism in mind. Make your choice accordingly, depending on how simple you want your smartphone experience.

Delete some apps

It’s not smartphones that are distracting – it’s all the apps we load on them. If you want to embrace mobile simplicity, get rid of as many apps as you can, maybe even all the time. To uninstall an app from the Android app drawer, press and hold its icon and drag it up to a file uninstall button; On the iPhone home screen, press and hold the app icon and select remove the app.

If you need some help figuring out which apps you waste most of your time on, your phone can help here. On Android, open Settings and choose Digital Wellbeing and Parental Control To see how much time you’ve spent on each of your apps recently. On iOS, choose from Settings Device usage time. These same screens give you options to place limits on the use of apps, which is another way to become a less phone user.

You don’t necessarily have to delete the accounts associated with these apps, though This is also an option. Remember that even if you uninstall apps like Twitter and Instagram from your phone, you can still access them on the web (and people can still contact you through them)—because you won’t be constantly tempted to open them on your phone.

Manage your notifications properly

Maybe you want to keep certain apps on your phone for whatever reason, but you wish it didn’t interrupt your day too much. Both Android and iOS now have plenty of notification options that you can tweak: Head over to Notices And the App Settings From Android Settings or Notices From iOS Settings to make changes and silence some (or all) apps on your phone.

Your phone can also mute itself for certain periods of time. On Android, open Settings and choose sound and vibration And the do not disturb: This mode can be enabled manually or with a timer, and it’s up to you which apps (if any) are allowed to display notifications, rings, and sounds. You can also select specific contacts who will still be able to reach you when Do Not Disturb is enabled.

On iOS, open Settings and tap to focus: You can set up certain rules for different scenarios (such as being in the office or driving between places), and there is a standard do not disturb option as well. To help reduce distractions, You can set specific lock screen and home screen combinations, and just like in Android, You can specify which apps and contacts do not apply custom rules.

Make your phone less attractive

Aesthetics are a big part of minimalism, and you can quickly reduce the visual appearance of your phone with a tougher color scheme and a simpler background (see options below Show And the wallpaper and elegance In Android Settings and Screen brightness And the Wall paper in iOS Settings).

Pixel phones have a special sleep time mode that dims the screen and switches to grayscale mode: from the settings, Choose Digital Wellbeing and Parental Controland then sleep time mode To turn it on manually or set to run on a schedule. iOS doesn’t offer anything that matches this feature, but you can put your iPhone in grayscale mode – from Settings, tap Accessibilityand then Width and text sizeand then color filters.

Another option for Android phones is simple phone: It’s a launcher app that implements a basic monochrome text-based interface, as well as offering additional tools to manage the time you spend inside apps and suppress notifications when you don’t want to be disturbed. It is an interesting method and you can easily go back to the normal operating mode of your phone when needed.

Buying a simple phone

You have another option here, and that is to buy a phone that is designed to be ultra slim. A number of features Phones are available from NokiaFor example, from under $50. You can make calls and send texts, but there’s no Instagram or Snapchat to distract you from the real world (Google Maps is on these phones, so you can still go from A to B).

then there Light Phone II, a $300 phone that was designed to be as lightweight as possible (which may have inspired the name). There’s an electronic paper screen, just the basics in terms of functionality (the calculator is as sophisticated as it gets), and the interface is lines of text and a few hand-picked icons. Switching to something like this could seriously reduce your phone usage.

Something similar is offered by and siphon, which will set you back $400. It’s a bit more advanced than the Light Phone II – it can take photos, for example, and there’s a basic map app built in – but then again there’s a monochrome interface that mostly uses text only, and there’s hardly anything in the apps’ way. You won’t spend hours of your life scrolling through social media on Wisphone.