Ask HN: How do I stop wasting so much time on my phone?

one thing I've seen recommended is setting the phone to greyscale mode (which is an accessibility setting)

Disable notifications.

Read Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. The only real long-term solution is to change your relationship with your phone.

It doesn't need to be within reach at all times. You probably barely need it at all, maybe 1% of the time. Just turn it off and leave it home unless you know you'll need it.

Delete the apps and set your privacy settings to not allow you to get to their web sites.

If you want to go to them you need to disable the content restrictions so is a barrier to you going to them.

I’m in same situation as you sometimes I end up wasting hours scrolling Twitter Reddit and Reading Discussions on HackerNews.

Then regret I wish I hadn’t wasted my time and had done something productive.

I have tried a technique of locking my phone into a kitchesafe box but didn’t worked for me

So In the end I believe the problem is me I gotta really discipline myself

Podcasts + walking

It might sound crazy to suggest more phones as a solution but using two phones, one of which has browser blocked with screen time and other one I leave in my office. That allows me to intentionally leave my browser enabled phone and use my other phone when I want to be less tempted to scroll a lot.

I never had any notifications on my phone to begin with. I then went a step further and put it on a shelf behind me. Now the only time I notice I have a phone is when I need to recharge it.

I also own an iPad - again, no notifications. I recently put Safari on a 35m/day limit. Works pretty well.

1. Remove all notifications. 2. Make it annoying to access the browser - as in put the icon in a menu that's not on the front page 3. I don't know if these exist, but you could potentially make a dns proxy that intentionally slows down the requests. Degraded performance is a big turnoff. 4. Get a feature phone. They're pretty good these days...

My take is that people mostly do what they want to do. So, maybe you deep down you don't really care that much about learning "cool stuff", or maybe you haven't found a particular cool thing that excites you enough to spend time and energy on it.

I bought a dumb phone. Now it's impossible to waste time on the phone (only calls and sms). The transition period was brutal, though.

Waste it with something else. Get Steam and download some nice games.

Learning more stuff is pointless after some point. Set some study time goal every week and after you are done you are free to do whatever you want.

Get the self control. Simple as.

Android? Stay Focused app is gold.

I've never owned a smart phone because of this, even when I was a system administrator for lots of people with them.

It helps that I grew up before cell phones were invented, younger people might not be as flexible. I can still get places with an address and town name, and a Rand McNally Atlas.

Stop looking at it. Put it on silent, and don't check it. It sounds too simple to be true, but it actually is. Only the first 2-3 days are a pain, after that, it will get easier and easier.

Firefox on android has support for ad blocking extensions. I removed reddit's app and blocked it in the browser (having an adblocker on mobile is glorious by the way). You could do the same with hacker news and youtube. Then, when you want to use them you can still open it up but it's one extra annoying step to select "temporarily allow" when trying to visit it.

I found it was really effective for cutting back on reddit but still being able to use it occasionally as needed.

I had one of this crazy apps that blocked all others apps. Didn't work at all for me. I was pressing delay all the time. self control i would say. you have to practice.

The noprocrast setting on HN is very good for overcoming HN addiction. You can set it to throw you off for Y minutes after you've been on here X minutes, or anything you like. Being thrown off for 12 hours after 10 minutes on HN works wonders.

For the more general problem—throw your phone away? What price getting your life back?? (I've never owned a mobile phone, but still have to deal with other peoples' addictions to them.)

First know that the problem is in your mind and not in the phone. So don't look for a solution in tech. Work backwards.

Your mind, that beautiful marvel of biological evolution craves for depth, give it that. Occupy your mind with something it needs - depth.