Tame your tech

The first thought that comes to mind as I sit down to write this essay is Shakespeare’s Taming of the shrew. Whatever your thoughts may be about the misogyny in the play (I am certainly not a fan myself), it helps to think of technology as the Katherina in our lives who needs a bit of taming unto obedience. However, do not be under the impression that I have all the answers here because if the growth and evolution of technology is any indication nobody can claim to have a complete answer. These are thoughts primarily for myself, both as a means of thinking aloud and as an invitation to a discussion, where I consider some simple methods of better controlling the many technologies in our lives and sobering our relationship with them.

Start by acknowledging the problem

Most of us never make it past the first steps and remain at the mercy of our gadgets because we fail to acknowledge that a problem exists. My definition of a problem is rather strict: if you reach for your phone as soon as you get up, while still in bed, for any reason besides turning off your alarm, you have a problem. A milder definition might be this: you have a problem if more than a third of your morning hours before work is spent with your devices¹.

Before going any further it is worth defining what we mean by a ‘gadget’. We do not simply mean an electronic gadget: your fancy digital hairdryer or internet-connected toothbrush, for example, are not the sorts of gadgets we are interested in; your television, on the other hand, is. By ‘gadget’ then we mean any device that allows passive consumption of information or multitasking and has no analogue counterpart. This could be your smartphone, laptop, tablet, television, smartwatch etc. It does not include your Kindle because, despite being a tool for passive² consumption, it has an analogue counterpart in books.

Having a ‘problem’ could be defined, even more broadly, as habitually using your gadgets for over nine hours a day. Although nine might seem like an arbitrary number, the reason I chose it is simple: if you are asleep eight hours a day and are left with 16 waking hours, of which four are spent washing up, cooking, eating, commuting etc., using your gadgets for nine of the remaining 12 hours amounts to three-quarters of your potential work/leisure day spent with your gadgets.

Now we proceed with the assumption that we do have a problem and that we have fully accepted it.

Set up an absolute downtime

It is critical to start with what we feel is the least resistive option while trying to improve our habits: restrict gadget usage roughly around the times you would not normally use your gadgets in the first place. This might seem pointless on the face of it but a little exploration should clear things up nicely.

If you normally sleep at ten and wake up at six—or if you at least want to make that your sleep schedule—set up downtime on your phone to start half-an-hour before and end at the time your awaken i.e. 9:30 pm to 6:00 am. Apple devices have a Screen Time feature that lets you track your phone usage (we will revisit this presently) as do some recent Android devices. On iOS at least you have a downtime option that lets you completely disable apps between preset hours such as 9:30 pm to 6:00 am while whitelisting some apps as ‘Always allowed’.

Pick critical apps like phone, messages, FaceTime or any others that you may need, say, to contact your family a bit late in the night and leave other apps disabled. Disable your e-mail app at any cost. Disable social media apps too. Disable YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV and other such apps. Only keep critical apps enabled via ‘Always allow’ so that your phone is little more than a barebones direct communication device.

Cut down apps

When it comes to an overuse of apps, news aggregators are the biggest culprits. In the guise of being one app that serves all your news-related needs they turn everyone into uncontrolled news junkies. In reality, unless you closely control what sources you get your news from, you are probably getting more noise than signal. One news aggregator is effectively fifty news apps or more. Especially in this day and age it pays to handpick trustworthy news outlets. Pick no more than five news apps, throw them into a folder and call it a day.

Personally, I use two subject-related news apps (physics/science for me), and three national/international news apps. If you are worried about getting a skewed picture, realise that a good news outlet will carry biased opinion pieces but unbiased reportage so the facts should arrive at your desk promptly. If you still harbour doubts, pick a liberal newspaper and a conservative newspaper and one in-between.

If you like to also read magazines, count those as separate apps. But, unlike in the case of news aggregator apps, which might fetch from heavily-skewed free and ‘alternate’ news websites, since most magazines charge subscription fees—as opposed to delivering single articles for free—it pays to get just one newsstand app (my recommendation is Zinio) and enjoy all your magazines on it. This also makes subscription management hassle free. You will still need the magazine’s own app if they do not offer their subscription through an aggregator (trust me, there is always one spoilsport of this sort).

Moving past news aggregators, RSS readers and newsstand apps, think about apps that you use in general. Do you really need the one shiny additional feature an app provides? Or will a stock app do? In the early days of iOS, when the first iPhone was released, there was no App Store; and when the idea of an App Store was created with subsequent iPhones, again during the initial years, Steve Jobs was adamant about rejecting all apps that replicated the behaviour and purpose of any stock app, which mean no calendar apps, no mail apps, no reminder apps etc.

Apple has since relaxed that rule but it is still worth thinking about deeply in our personal lives: will the stock app bundled with my phone serve my purposes or do I need an additional app to do something much more? For instance, do I need a scanner app or will the scanner built into my phone do just fine? But some third-party apps are unique and have no stock alternatives: Instagram, Twitter and other services; chess, two dots and other games; Procreate, Notability and other writing/drawing apps; portfolio management apps, bank apps, calorie counters etc. None of these are exactly replaceable so use them if you find the need, however, keep an eye on your stock apps because sticking with them is often the simplest, most straightforward approach to curbing the number of apps on your phone.

Silence your phone while working

A study by Cary Stothart et. al.³ in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human perception and performance’ showed that the act of getting a visual or auditory notification on your phone is just as distracting as acting on said notification. In other words, claiming that you are good to go just because you have developed the discipline of not immediately responding when your phone buzzes or pings or lights up to notify you is wrong. If you notice your phone’s notification, you have as good as picked it up and toyed with it.

The solution to this problem is simple but is something we rarely think about: silence your phone when you expect to be involved in deep work, and then set it face down.

Better yet, the next time an app you install asks you if you want notifications, actually think about it instead of blindly allowing notifications. You do not need notifications from most games; you do not need notifications from social media apps either⁴; likewise with news apps. For apps you have already installed head to settings and turn off notifications unless having them is critical e.g. for alarm apps or for some apps that backup your data automatically. And for apps that you really need glanceable data from rather than immediate notifications, turn on the option to retain notifications in the notifications sheet while turning off sounds.

The Gmail app is a big culprit in this case, notifying you of every incoming e-mail. The stock mail.app in iOS and macOS is more reasonable: you need to set contacts as VIPs if you want notifications when they e-mail you. All other e-mails arrive silently with the badge updating its count to keep you informed about new e-mails. Eschew the Gmail app—regardless of what security claims Google makes—and stick to the default mail.app on iOS/macOS with an IMAP set-up, especially since the default mail.app simply fetches and never reads your e-mails on a remote server in the middle of nowhere. Not having automatic categorisation is a small price to pay for this⁵.

The act of switching off notifications for most apps and choosing to keep it on for some is a small step towards taking control of your gadget: you will read the news when you sit down to read it, not when a publisher thinks you should; you will go through your social media notifications on your time, not on someone else’s; and you will know when a notification does arrive that it really is important.

While we are on the subject of e-mails, unsubscribe mercilessly from any newsletters you have signed up for that you no longer find yourself reading (including my own if you see no use for it). All newsletters that are above the board carry an unsubscribe line, usually at the very bottom, in every issue.

Set up ‘Walden zones’

In my review of William Powers’s book Hamlet’s Blackberry I mentioned his proposal of creating ‘Walden zones’ in our homes. This is something I have taken to doing myself, recently. The idea of a Walden zone, inspired by Thoreau’s Walden, is to designate gadget-free areas at home, at least during specific hours; this is meant particularly for the bedroom, at least at night if not all day long. Of course you are free to extend your Walden zone wherever you may please but, like any idea, you may start despising the idea itself if you overdid it.

Start with the bedroom and end there if you must. Make sure none of your gadgets come into your bedroom except as tools or for charging. Minimise the number of devices you charge by your bedside too if you can afford to. Most of us use our phones as alarms with good reason, so our phones get to stay despite being arguably the biggest culprits around. However, your laptop and tablet and, above all, television should have no place in the bedroom.

When you start out this idea may be hard to implement, but there is no need to be hard on yourself for that. Take it one step at a time and try to make things easy by never bringing devices into your bedroom; but if you do bring one in, take note of it consciously and walk out immediately, sit elsewhere and finish your work before you return to your bedroom. As brain scientist Matt Walker explained in his excellent TED talk on sleeping, ‘…your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association. So only return to bed when you are sleepy…’

Rein in your tabs

Browsing the web no doubt accounts for a large part of our gadget usage, especially when that gadget is a phone or a laptop or a tablet. Who has not found themselves sitting before fifty tabs that have remained open and unused since a week? Even if your number is not this alarming—and especially if it worse—try to cut down tabs by setting simple rules for yourself. It is true that we are terrible at following our own rules, but there is little else that can reliably handle this problem on our behalf.

I still remember when tabs became a prominent feature in browsers around 2003 with Firebird (now Mozilla Firefox) and Opera taking the lead, with Apple’s Safari leading in the idea of a cookie-suspended Private tab. Although tabs themselves had been invented nearly a decade earlier in InternetWorks, it was not until these mainstream browsers incorporated the feature that people started using heavily. The idea here is that tabs were a ‘feature’ much like air conditioning systems (called ‘weather conditioners’ back then) were advertised as ‘available at an extra cost’ in cars in the 1940s.

People used to pay extra for air conditioning once upon a time but it eventually became so common that not having it is now like missing a wheel entirely. Browser tabs too are just as common now that we simply take them for granted to be a standard feature in any browser.

Rather than use tabs to do something simultaneously—which is why tabs were invented in the first place—we now routinely use tabs to create markers for our own browsing history. As evinced by a quick study by Patrick Dubroy, made about half-a-decade after tabs entered mainstream browsers, people had, on average, about ten browser tabs open at any given time. This was ten years ago and it is not hard to fathom that the numbers today would be several times greater. A poll on OpenSource.com, for instance, now shows most people have 20+ tabs open (no specific higher number is given, unfortunately). For the curious, iOS Safari has a maximum tab limit of 500. You can check how many tabs you have open on your iPhone by long pressing the new tab button; if the number is less than 100 and you have been using your phone for over six months, drop me an e-mail.

The trouble with tabs is that they create an attention divide. However, the reason we have so many tabs open is not a lack of attention span, rather it is due to loss aversion believes Adam Stiles, the inventor of browser tabs (as opposed to tabs in general—they existed in HTML editor programs well before browser tabs). Mr Stiles explains that because whatever is on a tab is hard to find we find it hard to close tabs. That is to say, because we subconsciously consider prominently the effort that it took to find the information we currently have opened on a particular tab, we find it hard to close it; we do not want to lose that information especially since we feel losses more than we do gains.

If you take a step back, though, the problem with too many browser tabs is not entirely new. Before 2003 people had too many bookmarks. Tabs simply fit themselves snugly between open windows and bookmarks acting as containers for web pages not important enough to bookmark but important enough to keep around for just a little while longer. However, too many bookmarks is not a bad thing because bookmarks are mostly out of our sight and not, like tabs, constantly vying for our attention and dividing it. Try to limit the number of browser tabs you use; a quick reference would be that most desktops have screens wide enough to allow for around ten browser tabs to be open before you have to scroll through the tab bar to reach a tab. At that point, restart your browser. This has the added benefit of clearing up temporary space occupied by the browser too, which is usually a good thing.

In case of smartphones, make it a habit to spend five minutes over weekends to go through and clear out all your browser tabs. Much like a physical object you own, if you have not used a browser tab across a few browsing sessions, you can probably do without whatever is on that tab.

Identify problematic tech and useful tech

Not all technology is bad. The problem why most ‘tame your tech’ style arguments fail to bother readers is because they attack technologies left, right and centre without making space for exceptions. As someone who is, both professionally and otherwise, an avid user of technology in one form or another, I am staunchly of the opinion that any technology—whether hardware or software—falls into one of two categories: tools and entertainment, or creation and consumption if you will. Where a technology provides a tool it is an enabler; where it offers entertainment it becomes a distraction.

Of course in either case your methods of using it go a long way to make technology what it is—much like any tool—but we can all agree that the Netflix app and your spreadsheet app are two different classes of technology: one is purely entertainment, often a bit too much; and the other we all wish was more entertaining than it currently is.

In most cases it is not the ‘tool’ category of tech that demand our attention. This is because such technologies are almost always part of an implementation intention. When was the last time you opened Keynote or Numbers or Excel or Powerpoint at random and then started to think of something to do now that you have opened that app? Compare this to YouTube or Instagram—entertainment-type technologies—which are not part of an implementation intention: we usually mindlessly (or sometimes mindfully) open these apps and then think of something to do with them.

Start by identifying and classifying your everyday tech into one of these parts. Knowing what apps and programs you need to pay attention to versus what you can let slip because you obviously use them only when forced to can ease your life and help you tame your technology more efficiently.

Set up Screen Time by type and by verb

Apple introduced Screen Time with iOS 12, which Google quickly followed with a similar feature they called ‘Digital wellbeing’. While most Android devices do not have this feature, all Apple devices do. Furthermore if you own multiple Apple devices, like a Mac and an iPhone, Screen Time can be shared across devices to get a better picture not only of how you use your phone but how you use your gadgets on the whole. As useful as this feature is, its greatest weakness is your greatest weakness: willpower, or simply users being far too tempted by an app causing them to skip Screen Time.

If you have never set up Screen Time, do so. If you have and it does not seem to work for you, here are some points worth considering:

1. Screen Time will inevitably come down to how you choose to obey it, so make it your priority: obey whatever Screen Time tells you.
2. Use the ten-minute rule: when you find you have exceeded your Screen Time limit, instead of clicking ‘Ignore limit’ take ten minutes away from that app and then reconsider if you want to break your Screen Time limit anyway, then return to the app if you must.
3. Understand that Apple cannot possibly block off apps permanently like a stern parent disciplining their child; people would be up in arms claiming Apple is controlling their decisions if the company did this. Instead, Screen Time is about awareness: if you have set an hour of Screen Time for an app or group of apps and you hit the limit, when your device tells you as much, you know how much time you have spent on it. The key is awareness.
4. Another idea behind screen time is extraneous steps: by adding a couple of extra steps between you and the app—by adding planned inconvenience—your device tries to deter you from using the app unless you have enough of a reason to go over those extra steps to get to the app.
5. Take things a step further by setting up a Screen Time passcode. Make this a unconventional four digit number—that is, make sure it is not your birth year—and keep changing it frequently. That way, you need to pause and think about your Screen Time passcode and the additional inconvenience acts as an even more powerful deterrent.
6. The trick to using Screen Time effectively is to bundle apps in a sensible manner, not set it up for just one or few apps. The more the number of apps blocking you off, the harder it is for you to get from app to app without an annoying screen blocking you, which means the more effective your Screen Time blocks become.

Implementing these simple steps has proved effective for me personally. One of my measures of what I gain from this is my reading habit: since I started working with blanket Screen Time (and Downtime, see the first heading in this essay) across all my devices three weeks ago, I have finished reading three books. This used to be my pace before I got a smartphone and I am thrilled to return to it. Of course this is not to lay all blame on my smartphone; much like any new tool we users need some time to strike a proper balance with, I believe we tend to also take time to balance our relationships with our phones⁶.

When setting up Screen Time cover all apps except your ‘Always allowed’ apps. Divide them up by category and verb. For categories, Apple uses whatever type developers suggest for their apps so what is really a social media app might masquerade as a reading and reference app just because it has some reading component in it e.g. Goodreads classifies itself under ‘Books’. Take your own decision, therefore. Spend fifteen minutes at a stretch if you must because it will be worth it. Think of this as an investment in yourself. As for dividing by verb, think of what you do with the apps rather than what classifies the apps, e.g. reading apps, watching apps, educating apps, and use these along with classified apps, e.g. social media, news, games.

With Screen Time set up suitably, so long as you obey it religiously, you have nothing to worry. Not only does Screen Time coupled with Downtime allow you to take your mind off you tech usage habits—all you need to do is listen when Screen Time tells you you should probably not be using an app—but it also ensures you do not need to enforce more rules upon yourself e.g. the old way to get over FoMo used to be to restrict your news habits to the mornings; now, with Screen Time you can enforce a time limit on yourself while freely glancing at your news apps occasionally through the day (which is better for getting your news fix) while resting assured that you would not be overdoing it (which is great for you personally).

Again, the trick is to have as many apps as possible under Screen Time and Downtime restrictions. When one app stops you, getting past it is easy; when nearly all your apps stop you they act together as a powerful deterrent to prevent you from overusing your gadgets.

Do not be a luddite

Unfortunately the idea of becoming a stark raving minimalist, or even a luddite, is rarely far from any discussion involving controlling our use of technology. This is awkward considering how no other discussion prompts such extreme responses from people. Technology has the potential to be an efficiency booster, a tool that makes our work easy and polished, and an all-round enabler. And like any tool it has the potential to derail us.

While some parts of technology are definitely designed to distract, the tools themselves—the hardware especially—is not, nor is the operating system. The idea of hooking people onto an app is often restricted at just the app-level, which means everything else about technology is in our hands. The good news is that most apps that attempt to hook us are also apps that are not all that functional, apps that add little to our lives, apps that are, in a sense, disposable.

So dispose of what you can, take better decisions when it comes to your notifications, employ Screen Time features strategically and obey them, control your tabs, create Walden zones and take control of the tech in your life instead of letting it decide things for you. Strive to be a responsible user and tame your tech.