I Gained 2+ Hours of My Day Back by Deleting TikTok and Instagram From My iPhone
Knowing I give in to doom scrolling easily, I opted to play it safe.
Time is our most valuable asset, yet we don’t always treat it as such. If you are anything like the average global Social Media user, you spend around 2.5 hours on Social Media every day.
Per month, this adds up to 75 hours, which is enough time to “become reasonably good” at 3 different skills!
Keep it up for a year and you’ll have scrolled away 912.5 hours of your life. Instead, you could have gotten closer to near-fluency in notoriously hard-to-learn languages, such as Polish, Hungarian or Icelandic. For these, you’d need to study for around 1100 hours.
Scrolling on Social is not necessarily a bad thing. If you only follow educational accounts, your brain is getting digital potato chips you’d snack on in your free time anyway.
We’re dealing with a different scenario when you only consume content that is not enriching your life. Think of perfectly curated accounts that make you feel miserable about your own life or thirty different cat accounts. You don’t need thirty different cat accounts. If Social Media is your job, or if you curate a cat account yourself, again, different thing.
We’ve established bad habits
The other day my friend opened his phone and went straight for the Facebook app. The second item on his feed was an ad asking: “Do you want more sales?” He stops dead straight in his tracks, thinks the question over, and replies to his phone, “Yes, I want more sales!” We both laughed.
We pick up our phones out of habit. The constant pinging from your various apps keeps us on high alert, hungry for the next high. Before you know it, you trip on the slippery slope of the Eternal Scroll. You blink and an hour has passed. So much time goes down the drain without even realizing it.
How I ditched the bad habit and regained my time
When the end of the day nears, my willpower is closer to depleted. This makes me more susceptible to the lure of the scroll. If I touch a Social Media app after hours, I’m screwed!
Often I felt like “I don’t have enough time to work on my projects”. No wonder, if I’m spending hours on Social Media. What’s worse, this bad habit drained my energy.
I had to put a stop to it. I needed to become aware of where my time went. In order, this is what I tried, until I resorted to the only thing that worked (app deletion):
#1 Start using Screen Time app and install the widget
Screen Time became my new app to go. I installed the widget and placed it at the top of my Today view. I wanted to find patterns. When do I resort to Social Media? At which times? Which apps do I spend the most time on?
The later it got, the more time I spent on my phone. I also noticed I picked up the phone mostly when I am about to start a difficult task, a sign of poor emotional regulation. I felt discomfort when something felt too big to tackle. Instead of working through it, I tried to escape from it.
As a result, I averaged three to four hours on my phone. I was shocked.
Okay, I was aware of my sins. Now what?
#2 Airplane mode
First, I tried putting the phone on airplane mode but kept the device next to me. Didn’t work.
If I see it, I’ll grab and open it. Just like those bags of junk food in the pantry. Chips, chocolate, all of that. If It’s there, I will eat it.
#3 Time locks on apps
Next, I tried to limit the time spent on apps by setting an app limit. Didn’t work. I’d continue to exceed the limit after the previous one had passed.
#4 Clean up the home screen and hideaway non-essential apps
At first, I kept all my apps. I cleaned up my Home Screen so it only has productivity or educational apps I need daily.
In my Dock, I keep apps I use most often within a thumb’s reach. I keep Facebook on the phone for the social login but be sure that I keep it out of sight.
Any remaining Social Media-related apps, anything shiny that I don’t immediately need, is stored away in the second screen inside folders, or completely deleted from the Home Screen, so that I can only find it in the search bar, or when I navigate to the last screen. This usually costs more effort than I’m willing to take.
#5 Deleted soul-sucking Social Media apps
I kept cheating, exceeding my app limits, and scrolling as if it was my day job. I got so tired of this cycle of constant overstimulation. Instagram and TikTok were the worst, so these had to go. I tend to binge on YouTube, so to be safe, I deleted this app from my phone too.
I still download the Instagram app once per week. I scroll for about 10 minutes, get tired of it, and delete the app again. Craving satisfied for another week. TikTok is a gaping black hole. I’m steering well clear of that one.
The results
At first, I still grabbed my phone. As soon as I noticed, “Oh, the app isn’t there anymore, guess I’ll go do something else now”, I put the phone back and directed my attention to more worthwhile pursuits. I don’t need to hide the phone away anymore, but it helps if it’s out of my sight.
I’m at the point where I know I’ll feel bad if I overindulge in Social Media. I’d rather spend the time on something more useful. When I do grab the phone, there is not much else to do than:
- Read articles on Medium
- Study a language on Busuu, Speakly or HelloChinese
- Meditate on Headspace
Final thoughts
Analyze your phone and Social Media usage in the Screen Time app. If you think you can be disciplined enough, try putting your phone on airplane mode, put it where you can’t see it, or set time limits on apps.
Keep educational and productivity apps as well as anything you regularly use on the first screen. Remove shiny apps by tugging them away in folders on the second screen. Otherwise, remove them from your Home Screen completely. This stores them in the App Library, which you find on your last screen instead.
If you have poor self-discipline as I do, consider deleting time-consuming Social Media. This doesn’t need to be for good. You can compare how you feel with everlasting overstimulation versus being free from easy dopamine hits. And when you crave the scroll, download the app, give in to the scroll. Once you feel saturated, delete the app once again and enjoy freedom.
Voila, you just gained a few hours extra every day! All it took was deleting some apps and getting used to your new normal, free from overstimulation.
Not yet a Medium member? Get unlimited access to my writing and that of thousands of other writers for $5. If you sign up via the link, I’ll receive a portion of your subscription fee, which would help me out heaps!
