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+---
+title: "Use Notifications To Check Your Phone Less"
+date: 2025-10-17T00:00:00Z
+tags: ['computing']
+draft: false
+---
+In my entry "[Why I Don't Have a Smartphone](/2021/12/26/why-i-dont-have-a-smartphone/ "Journal Entry: Why I Don't Have a Smartphone")", I wrote:
+
+> "... [my smartphone] was in airplane mode unless I was making a call. It was always on silent with no vibration. Unless I deliberately pulled it out, it couldn't interrupt my day."
+
+I think my goal of spending less time on distracting technology was worthwhile, but that keeping one's phone always on silent with no vibration is not a practical way to achieve that for most people. Since writing that entry, I've started using a smartphone again and I've had to change the way I handle notifications as well since having it always on silent is no longer practical for me either.
+
+I have notifications turned on now because I noticed that when I had them off, I was constantly checking my phone every few minutes to make sure I didn't miss anything important. With notifications turned on, I don't need to poll my phone, because I'll hear a ding if something important happens. If I haven't heard a ding, I know I don't need to check it. So if I only use my phone either when I receive a notification or when there's something important I need to do on it, I know that I'm making good use of it. Otherwise, I know I'm probably wasting my time.
+
+If you're interested in replicating my notification strategy, you *must* curate your notification settings first on a per-app basis as I do. If you stick with the default notification settings for every app you have installed, you'll get pinged for many unimportant things and it won't help as much with checking your phone less. This isn't hard to remedy, and you don't have to fix it all at once. Each time you receive an unwanted notification, just go into settings and disable it. Eventually, all unwanted notifications will be gone. Repeat the process as you download new apps. The goal is to disable as many notifications as you can without falling back to constantly checking your phone.
+
+To close, I want to comment that I think that **in popular media, there's too much focus on reducing total time spent on one's smartphone, and too little focus on making sure the time is well-spent**. The common recommendations to check one's screen time or look at which apps you're using the most don't necessarily give much insight into whether you're making *good use* of the time. For instance, if you spend four hours per day on your smartphone, that might seem like a lot, but if you're using it to read a book or practice a foreign language, that time isn't wasted. If you're just autoplaying YouTube videos or mindlessly scrolling through infinite feeds during breakfast, that's a different story.
+
+As I've said before and I want to emphasize again here, I don't think telling every individual person to just be more disciplined and find new strategies each time a distracting technology comes out is a substitute for real, [systemic solutions](/2023/09/10/individual-vs-collective-advice/ "Journal Entry: Individual vs Collective Advice") that address the challenges created by these technologies. If we're going to have smartphones, they need to be non-distracting and non-addictive by default by design. In the meantime though, hopefully the notification strategy I've outlined here can help some people.