Notifications are blowing up your phone

First of all, go through all your apps and turn off some of your notifications. Be very selective with what apps you want to receive notifications from. Who needs notifications from Zara anyway? You can exclude all notifications that aren’t urgent.

Don’t talk to me

Use the do not disturb-feature, also known as the moon 🌙 button, to your advantage. If you turn on this feature you will not receive any notifications. You can use your phone when you choose to and not whenever your phone sends you a notification. What with urgent calls? No worries, in your settings you can choose an option where your favorites can still call you and when people call you twice in a row, it will also come through.

You have 1.543 unread emails

Another time-consuming app is email. Do you really read Victoria’s Secret’s newsletter? The only newsletter you should have in your inbox is the one from WE LIKE YOU! We get so many emails on a daily basis that we have to go through, make it a habit to unsubscribe frequently from newsletters that you just won’t read. Now you will have less clutter in your inbox. 📩

OCD

Being organized on your phone is so underrated. Cluster your apps into categories. Put your social media apps altogether in one section, this way you won't see your notifications for every app separately, but just one notification bubble. 📲 Do you want to take it to another level? With the new iPhone update, you can make an aesthetic home screen, where your apps all have the same color. A benefit of this is that it will not show you a notification number. Oh, and it also looks really good.

Keep on scrolling

How do you spend your 10-minute break? A lot of us will spend it on social media, where 10 minutes become 30 or maybe even an hour. Instead of being on social media as a break, try replacing it by watching a short video where you can actually learn from, or listen to an interesting podcast.

Tik Tok on the clock ⏱

Do you need a short non-disturbing moment to get sh*t done? Then you should use this method. Put a timer on your phone for 20 minutes. Leave the screen on so you can visually see how many minutes you have left. When you start the timer you will only work on one project, everything else will be ignored. You’ll be amazed at how much you get done!

Let’s build a forest

You can always download different apps to increase your productivity. One of these apps is called Forest. When you open the app it starts a timer, the longer that timer is running, the more trees you plant. When using the app you can’t go to other apps, if you do decide to go to another app it will stop the timer and it will stop planting trees. You might think: Why would I want to plant virtual trees? Forest actually helps to plant real trees all over the world. It’s a win-win!

Do you actually want to set productivity goals? Then Flipd is your go-to app. You can choose how long you want to be productive and decrease your screen time. You can pick out a category like studying, detox, focus, exercise,... Flipd also shows you how many other people are using that category at that time.

The main message we want to give you is: ‘Don’t become a slave to your phone. Be the boss and use your phone as a tool.’

Written by Corinne (intern at WLY)!