How to Optimize Your Mobile phone to Stay Productive

If you want to stay productive and kick away distractions that come with using the mobile phone, you are currently reading the right article.

According to recent research, an average internet user spends about 2 hours and 22minutes on social networking and messaging platform.

The mobile phone has a whole lot of benefits, but there are also downsides to it. If we want to be honest with ourselves, it is surprising to know how much time we waste averagely in a day checking through the mobile, smiling at comments on social media, taking pictures, streaming videos, chatting, scrolling and the list goes on.

Many of us spend countless amounts of time staring at that tiny screen and not getting things done on time. And time is very valuable regardless of what you do. In order to make the most of your time, everyone tries to do a task quickly and correctly as possible.

But our mobile phone can be hotbeds of distraction as it has huge power to control our attention. It can be a weight tying us down from becoming productive.

I remember in 2020 during the Covid’19 lockdown, I could stay 2 hours stretch chatting and smiling, scrolling through social media, reading blogs, and not getting stuff done on time.

Even though I needed to get up and work, I’d rather give myself another extra 20 minutes to reply to messages and not doing what is needed to be done.

It may not be your fault staying glued to your mobile phone, this is because a lot of technologies have been embedded into a single device – messaging, music player, games, camera, Netflix, alarm clock, touch light, heart rate monitor, and many more applications.

How big is your ToDo list? Is your mobile phone taking up your time? Right from waking up, your face is glued to your phone.

If you are curious like me, and you are looking for ways to reduce mobile usage for productivity, then read till the end.

9 ways to set up your smartphone to stay productive. Let’s Begin!

In this content...

Start phone free morning

A new day is a way to start a productive day. Waking up from sleep after a long night’s rest always comes with positive energy. You don’t want to waste this energy with your smartphone.

You can avoid distraction in the early hours of the day by curating a habit of not checking through your mobile phone.

For most people, the first thing they do upon waking up is to check through their mobile and this could lead to time wastage right from the first hour of the day.

Resist the urge to read text and reply chat people may have sent you overnight.

Turn Off all alert

No alert means fewer things to check and a lot less distraction. You can disable all notifications for some specific App.

Every phone beep/notification most time causes a break from productive work. Of course, there are always going to be a few apps that you feel the need to leave the notification on.

This means you are giving those apps permissions to interrupt you during work. However, you can turn off badges (App badges are the red dots with numbers in them that makes you become curious that there’s something important going on in that App).

On Android, go to general settings, then “apps”. You can toggle the badge off for any app you want.

On iPhone, click general settings, then “notification”. You can toggle the badge off.

Use Do Not Disturb (DND)

Many people don’t usually make use of this moon-like shape phone feature. Do not disturb is another way to keep away distractions.

If you need uninterrupted periods without phone calls, messages or notifications, just turn on the moon icon on your phone.

From your Android, just swipe down from the top, you will see it.
From IOS, just swipe up from below to see the moon icon, and then you can turn it on to activate. It works like magic.

Track phone Usage

You can track the usage of your mobile phone and all the activities across your devices with apps like Timely, Moment App.

You can get reports of emails, meeting schedules, Gps locations alongside your daily web and desktop activity.

Thanks to Timely which is a purpose-built time tracker that can feed your data into a wider picture of your working day across all your devices.

It makes reporting and invoicing of mobile work effortlessly.
If you really want to track your phone usage throughout the day, set goals, and be conscious of time spent on Apps without productivity, the Moment App can help you.

Use ToDo list App

Performing your tasks in an organized manner will make your day much more productive.

You can have a list of items/projects with specific tasks for each day rather than spending all your time being distracted.

Todoist is an app that can help you streamline your day. You can split your work into a specific task and set date for each work to be done, then give them one out of the four priority levels.

The priority level you give will ensure that you always finish the most important task first.
Other Apps that you can use to organize Todo list are Google Keep and Trello

You may also like: 11 Whatsapp features you may not know about

Yes! This may sound awkward. But the truth is that a larger percentage of distractions is through social media.

You just wanted to check an interesting notification on Facebook, and the next thing is you become glued to your friend’s status and smiling, then Tweeted a few times and next you open to watch some Instagram or Youtube videos.

Before you know it, you have spent minutes or hours unknowingly.

One of my very close friend recently uninstalled all his social media applications on his phone because he needed to learn programming.

It was a good decision for him to get rid of all the social media for a while to boost productivity because he discovered how addicted he has become to it and time-wasting for him.

As great as social media is, it can be a tremendous time-waster. But the Freedom App can help to block specific social media sites from your computer and mobile devices. Even if you have your free time, social media is not the only way to spend your free time. You may read 7 ways people spend their free time

Don’t sync your computer and mobile phone

The more you can minimize interruptions, the better. If your phone is a distraction machine, your computer should be a tool for focus.

When you synchronize your phone and computer, it is easy to get distracted by other tabs and windows open on your screen.

Use Pocket to save website

There are times when you will come across articles and blog sites that interest you to read, but you are too busy or not really ready at that time to check through them.

Pocket is an app for both IOS and Android that allows you to save Web pages with a single tap.

It can integrate with your browser and help you save interesting articles or web pages for later.

It is a super useful app that can keep your commute productive with just a single tap.

Make Use of Text-to-speech output

Your mobile phone can read out loud without having to touch it. To avoid distractions, you can activate the text-to-speech output on your mobile phone by letting your phone read aloud to you.

You can gain a lot of productive time by having your phone read messages, emails, incoming phone calls, web pages while you are busy working or doing some other stuffs.

This feature is available on both Android and IOS. You need to turn the feature On in the settings.
Open Settings, then
tap “general”,
click “accessibility”,
then “speech” and finally turn on the “speak screen”.

It is always very important to understand why you are letting your phone distract you since our smartphones are a major source of all distractions.

But the truth is that they are fantastic tools that can actually help to increase productivity.
So these are various ways to set up your smartphone to stay productive.

Hope you gained insight from this post. Let me know, I will love to read your feedback in the comment box.