Since I got a new watch a few months ago, I find myself looking at my phone less by accident. By that I mean those times when you just wanted to check the time and saw a notification, ended up checking email or Facebook anyway, and spent 10 minutes looking at the phone doing nothing useful.
But still there’s a number of times when that happens, mostly because of notifications. Having more Facebook friends than the years has days means that pretty much every day is somebody’s birthday. And so when I pick the phone in the morning the first thing I see is a Facebook notification about it, which gave me an excuse to open Facebook. I noticed that, for a while, the first thing I did in the morning was checking Facebook, and it didn’t feel right at all.
There’s also those times when you are slightly bored and go to your phone out of habit. I would check Facebook again, or maybe play a game, or catch up on blogs on Feedly.
I felt I was spending way too much time and attention on things of little value, so I stopped. This is my home screen today:
What you won’t find in there (or the other screen): Facebook, Twitter, games, Feedly, Flipboard, Zite.
I kept Pocket since at least that has content that I already selected myself. Other than that, if I’m checking my phone to kill some time, I have books.
I’ve had this going for almost a month and while I’ve barely had any notifications making me check my phone, I still have the habit of checking Facebook way too often, even from Safari.
