There was an article recently about a business owner who found that people in meetings were spending more time looking at their smartphones than they were around the room at one another and paying attention.
And he had two solutions.
One was they put a shelf outside the conference room and people were expected to leave their phones there before they came into the meeting so they wouldn’t be constantly distracted.
The other thing he did, was he offered to buy them flip phones if they would accept those as a replacement for the smartphones, and a surprising number of people took him up on that offer. Interestingly, they reported all of these positive benefits from no longer using a smartphone. They felt they had better concentration, they had more focus, but just in general, they seemed happier without constantly referring to their phones.
It brings up something interesting, which is if you’re looking to get away from a smartphone, you can find all kinds of tips online about how to do that, how to kind of break that addiction.
For me, it comes down to understanding what your “why” is for limiting your smartphone use. And for me, the compelling part that came out of the article were all the benefits that people got from that.
If your “why” is that you want to feel more engaged with the world around you, then figuring out the tips to reduce smartphone usage get a whole lot easier.