5 tips to reduce your phone addiction (for iOS)

This age is filled with digital distractions, and the first in the podium are our phone. Those little computers we carry everywhere beg for our attention and they receive it more than 2,600 times a day! If you are shocked by this number as I am, here are some tips to reduce your phone addiction.

1. Monochrome mode

There is no wonder notification badges are red, they are trying to get our attention and push us to interact with our phone. But what if you can turn these colors off?

If you have an iPhone, you can set up an accessibility shortcut to turn your phone between black&white and color mode quickly via a triple-click on the side button or via back-tap (see tip #4 below).

Turning your phone into monochrome mode helps you reduce screen brightness and reduces your phone distractions.

2. Built-in background white noise

If having a background music helps you work and relax, know that your phone comes with a built-in background music generator! You can now enjoy relaxing sounds like rain or white noise with no need for third party apps.

You can find this in Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds. Or you can add a button in Control Center to toggle this quickly or use it with Shortcuts (see tip #5 below).

3. Focus mode

Focus mode was introduced in iOS 15 as a way to help you quickly toggle between different distraction-free modes for your phone. These modes can then be enabled either manually in Control Center, via Hey Siri, via Shortcuts, or by letting iOS learn from your habits…

For example, you can configure a focus mode to:

• Disable all notifications from Text Messages and Phone calls (except for specific contacts) from your lock screen.
• Hide notification badges from app icons when in “Work” focus mode to avoid the incentive for distraction.
• And many more features

You can learn more about Focus modes here.

4. Quick back-tap actions

Did you know your iPhone can “feel” your taps on the back? Here’s how to turn it on.

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap. From there, you can configure it to do something every time you tap it 2 or 3 times. This can be very useful to quickly enable things like the monochrome mode or background white noise.

5. Advanced: Shortcuts app

This is an advanced tip as it’s not as easy as turning things on/off.

The Shortcuts app is used to trigger and chain multiple commands following a trigger, which is usually a tap, or a time of the day. Shortcuts can be used to turn music on, activate a Focus mode, change monochrome mode… all by a tap of a button.

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I hope you found this article interesting. You can see other productivity posts like this on our blog.

* This post is heavily inspired by an internal post in Automattic.