Apps are great. But we are not great at using them. Useful ones do not get enough attention and useless ones we get addicted to.
We waste our precious life in using apps which are reducing the value of your life. APPendectomy reduces APPetite is a nice way of saying that if you reduce excessive dependence on apps, your life will improve.
If you have noticed the problem and feel that you need a solution, try this approach. These are random ideas. But I have used these at various points of time.
One or more of these ideas may be useful to you. No harm in trying these out.
Let me know your feedback.
- Do not download any apps which reduce app dependence.
That is like wasting time in finding the best time management method when you have shortage of time! - Use excessively. Take unpaid leave. That way, you will get bored of using the app.
- If you have the guts to do so, delete it.
- Make a list of apps in Excel and in the second column put a value score. Higher score means more useful. Zero means useless waste of time and 3 means mandatory. Now make a pivot table. See the count in each category zero, 1, 2 and 3.
If you do not have anything in the 0 and 1 category, You are basically lying to yourself. Add another column called Real Scores and rethink. Delete anything below the score of 3. Not possible? Then at least delete Zero and One score. - If this does not work and most apps are in 2 or 3, the scoring method is not useful to you. Ask someone you love and trust to do the prioritization for you.
- Find more useful apps. The reason you have useless apps is because you have less useful apps. Read reviews. Do not just go by the top charts sorting order. Yes you will need time to find good apps. But it is better than wasting it on useless apps.
- Fun, games, trivia, social media, gossip, everything should be done. But when it starts eating into your own life, you have to notice it and take action. You diagnose it and you treat it. Nobody else can help you.
- Try APPstinance. Only use the phone for calls and nothing else. If chat is a part of your business or some other critical communication, use that as well. But only as a reaction. Do not send messages to others. Respond to what others are saying if you feel it is critical in some way. Time yourself. How long did you last? Whatever the time is, try it every day. You will notice that the time is going to increase over time.
- Check if you have an ambition. If not, find it first. Once you have an ambition, think of what you are doing to achieve it. Consider if all the time you are spending on the phone is helping you achieve your ambition or goals.
- Find a non-mobile-phone way to entertain yourself. Often when we have nothing to do we look at the mobile screen… hoping that it will provide you with some immediate direction about what you should do. Of course, mobile phone does not have any app to tell you that. It just shows whatever notifications happen to get generated. So your life is now notification driven.
- If you do not get any text message, chat message, likes, shares, views, pings, pokes, meeting invites, mails for some time, you may feel like a lonely loser. That makes you do something which will elicit a response. You end up chatting with people we have never contacted for years, you send random mails or post irrelevant things on social media, follow some people, share insignificant stuff with your network – potentially wasting their life as well.
- Decide a time value for yourself. Consider how much money you make based upon your salary or turnover or some other benchmark. Convert that to a per minute value. Now, when you use anything on the mobile phone, think of the time spent, multiply that with the time value and check if the usage resulted in something useful worth equal to or more than the base value. If not, think differently. Whatever time you spent, is it increasing the potential of the value of your time? If yes, continue it. If no, think about it seriously.
Let me know if the APPendectomy reduces APPetite approach worked for you. Your ideas are most welcome.
