My new year resolution: reduce screen time on iPhone and social media

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Or, put it bluntly, to combat my iPhone addiction 🙁

Why

What do you do the 1st thing after you wake up? Hopefully you are not like me “yes you guessed it right, look at my iPhone and check the WeChat blah blah blah” 🙂 Sometimes I wonder if “I own the iPhone; or the iPhone owns me”.

Warren Buffett Bought Apple Stock After Hearing of Friend’s iPhone Loss – Markets Insider Good thing Warren himself is not addicted to iPhone. A few years ago, I recall Yu Ming’hong had similar feeling when he “lost” his phone in a taxi.

Btw, I believe he is probably one of the few people who uses iPhone just for phone calls. Or you can say he belongs to the endangered species category 🙂

Another reason I want to do it is to lead by example: so that I would be more persuasive when ask kiddos not to watch TikTok or YT hosts on devices

Other apps or websites could be addictive or misleading too. For example, Robinhood’s gimmicks for its new year countdown rewards: I did participate the 1st one (open to everyone, count down to clock on 7:30 pm my time), and received about $6 worth of Dodge Coin (coin is a misused here too, refer to here). The 2nd count down is on 6 pm central on Jan 1st: open to Robinhood Gold members only. And the participants received about $8 worth of bitcoin. This reminds me all those fraudster and casinos woo people to join.

Another example: couple days ago I saw Google News show the two recent tragic events – New Orleans and Las Vegas. In terms of grand scheme of the things, those SHOULD NOT BE THE TOP TWO NEWS in the USA. There are many other more news worth things going to, from politics to sports, but those news grab people’s attention and it helps the mainstream media’s bottomline. I recall about 20 years ago an Accounting faculty at STLCC commented on Google’s stock: it’s all about eyeballs. Now I recall back in 1997, when I was new to the states, for a few days the CNN broadcast Princess Diana after her tragic death nonstop. And in 1998, similar coverage for JFK Jr. when his plane downed, and his wife, his wife’s sister and himself died: coverage conclueded after the coast guard found the airplane wreckage and their bodies in the sea.

New Media is always about eyeballs … this is also putting pressure on traditional newspapers (local) because their revenue dropped precipitously – Auto and House.  

How

I have a friend who is much more disciplined than me, and he said he would put the phone in the drawer (in the days before pandemic), when he gets home from work. I may want to try that too – if I go to coffee shop for work in the near future. My current job is 99.9999% work from home, and in theory I can go to the company office too (a few minutes way), I think I may do that once the kids start school (tomorrow).

We also tried Lock Box for kids’ iPads. It ended up being kids’ toy.

1. Set up Screen Time on iPhone – Apple Support This doesn’t work perfectly for me at least. For example, in a few mornings I wake up early, and my Apple Watch cannot start to work for me before 7 am likely because of my screen time settings. I got rid of most those things later. I vaguely recall on Mac there are some other strangeness due to this.
2. OffScreen: Screen Time Control on the App Store  I used in the past. And I am using it again for the last few days. 
3. My other tips: Limit social media app installation: all social media apps are addictive, right now I only have WeChat: for communication with my Chinese friends, among them my dad, and my big brother who are both in China). YouTube, YouTube Music and YouTube Studio (for uploading video to YouTube). I have a YouTube premium subscription (family) and I skip most of the ads on YT, also I listened to YT Music. For YT Studio and my own YT Channel, I am at an experiment stage. For the record, I installed and uninstalled Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Chinese social media upstart Xiaohongshu many times. Last but not least, WeChat is probably one of the top time suckers for me. As I said above, my dad sometimes would call me, that’s why I have it on. I tried a few small things sometimes to reduce my time there: disabled the moments, log out, cleanup the groups that I am active, and so on. One tip I learned from a new friend recently, and I plan to implement, that is I am going to use regular phone and text instead of WeChat if I am talking to some Chinese friends on WeChat. I will report back how it goes.
4. Robinhood app: I am thinking use less of it at least. Probably do something with thinkOrSwim (I mean the app). I may use the screen time limit for the two apps. I am more lenient on desktop because I tent to overuse when I have the apps. Related matter: over the years I have done my share of install, uninstall, reinstall of the stock trading apps 🙂 我想有些事情可能是属于灰色地带：对这些stock trading app 来说我要控制好度（比如说，一天总共花多少时间）。
5. A related tip is to use a computer and iPad for some of the tasks, for example, I still use FB, LinkedIn etc. I can use either the mobile Safari or the regular Chrome browser on my computer(s). 
6. Random thoughts – Is giving smartphones to preteens or teens potentially giving away their virginity? Or I am paranoid on this one?
7. Quit social media, or moderate social media use (related to bullet 3): my old trick to edit the /etc/hosts on Mac; not sure whether similar things can be done on Windows.

Future state

This is still related to the above. Something I have gave some thoughts and also something I am experimenting in last 6 months.

For example, for quite a few years, when I go out for a walk or run, I usually carries my iPhone and listen to the music, podcast or YT (pre downloaded video) via AirPods. In a few days recently, when I was sure I wouldn’t need the phone (when I expected nobody needed me right away), I decided to NOT carry the iPhone. Or I bring my good old iPod Nano and listen to radio.

I have a standalone radio too, and I plan to use it more in my bedroom and bathroom.

A lot of times I think I got bored, and look at iPhone by default. This is not what I want. I want to be more intentional. I just ordered an iPad Air from Amazon too – hope to use it for Kindle etc, or consume and even write my blog post there. In other words, I plan to instead of being an iPhone potato (passively consume the content mindlessly), I want to be more intentional and create something that hopefully is good.

Another thing to do is just to read a good old book.

PS:

Some parents may think technical restriction (for example block websites in the WiFi router at home – unplug the wires in the good old days :-), or the native parent control comes with iPhone, iPad (iOS). I don’t think those are the best approaches. We used to have a neighborhood kid, whose mom has screen time limit (parent control), would bring her iPad to our home, and play on her iPad, when the time is up, she would FaceTime her mom, for more minutes 🙂 At one time, my wife and I suspected she came to our home mainly to play on her iPad 🙂 My point is 道高一尺，魔高一丈 kids will find a way. I heard similar stories in LMS in which kids find ways to play games on school iPad, or go to YouTube.

Always something new to learn for teachers and parents.