Happy (productive?) fall

A return to routine, and how I'm taming my phone

Hi friends,

It’s finally rainy and cooler here in Cleveland after about a month of no rain and unexpected summer temperatures. When even the weeds are wilting, you know it’s time for a change.

For many years, fall has meant back-to-routine time here at my house. This is a good thing, because everyone, including me, thrives on a bit of routine. Summer is fun, but it untethers us. Eventually we’re all getting a little dizzy and need to get off the merry-go-round and back onto solid ground.

But the return of fall, and the quiet daytime house that comes with it, takes away my most convenient excuses for unproductivity. In summer, I can claim it’s the noise or needs of my teenagers derailing my work. After they’re in school, I have only myself to blame. And my phone, of course. It’s old news that our phones are built to distract us and that they’re ridiculously successful at it.

In honor of September’s traditional return to productivity, I thought you might like a little peek at the ways I try to protect myself from my phone, since willpower alone will not do it for me:

• I delete my most addictive apps.  A couple of years ago I had minor surgery that required me to basically lie on the couch for a couple of days with a ice pack over one eye. Reading was difficult, so I downloaded the game Candy Crush. Two months later, my eye was long healed and my Candy Crush addiction was in full swing. When I found myself dreaming of Candy Crush, I finally deleted it. (Maybe I should not confess this, but I still miss it if I think about it!) I recently realized there were also plenty of other apps I tend to click on aimlessly, the total phone minutes and hours quickly adding up. Bye bye, Facebook, Threads (a successor to Twitter), and my news apps. I can still look at any of these on my computer if I really want to. Election anxiety or not, there is no post or breaking news that requires my immediate attention. Luckily, I don’t miss them, and my screen time has already dropped.

• I disable or bundle notifications. Every time my phone lights up, I’m tempted to look at it. To counter that, I have almost all notifications turned off. On an iPhone, check Settings > Notifications. There you can turn off notices from your individual apps or choose a “Scheduled Summary” if you still want them but not all the time. I have turned off mine for nearly everything except text notifications, which I still like to get right away, except…

• I mute notifications for some text threads. I have a few big group texts that are super fun and chatty but almost never urgent. For these, I click on the group name at the top of the thread and then scroll down to toggle on “Hide Alerts.”

• I set app limits. I have set limits on certain apps that I’ve kept but that I don’t consider addictive (New York Times Games, Instagram), but which I still risk spending too much time on. I set these limits on my iPhone under Settings > Screen Time > App Limits > Add Limit. If I reach that limit, I can override it, but it does make me think twice.

Taken together, these limits have helped me to significantly cut my daily screen time. I still hesitate to say what my total time is (so it’s not great, I guess!) but I’m just happy when I see my top categories are typically podcasts, texts, and email or Google Maps, and not so much of anything else. I would love to hear about your relationship with your phone — and I think I speak for all of us when I say I welcome more advice about this love-hate relationship.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with warm wishes for a cozy start to fall, along with one of my favorite recipes for delicious late-season tomatoes: Blistered Cherry Tomato Toast. Yum!

Fondly,

Sharon

p.s. Check out this pretty and plump monarch butterfly caterpillar that I spotted on a recent walk. We are starting to get inundated by invasive and destructive spotted lanternflies (squish them!), so I’m especially savoring the good guys like this one, just a native critter enjoying a good snack.