“Most people check their phone every 15 minutes or less, even if they have no alerts or notifications,” Larry Rosen, psychology professor and author of The Distracted Mind, tells CNBC.

Cell phones have become a regular part of our lives. Without a doubt, we need them for so many things that are just not practical doing with the old ways. Checking emails on the go, finding directions, making online payments, paying bills and the list goes on. We probably won’t be able to do much, if anything, without a phone now a days. That is not a bad thing, it just that we have adapted the technology to make our lives more productive.

However, there is not a thing that’s only great without any side effects. Cell phones allow us to do so many things and that is what the problem is now. Cell phones let us do so many things – too many for our own good. Millions of games, social media apps with endless content, highly addictive apps that keep us glued to the devices more than we need to or even want to.

Enough with the cell phone bashing. Let’s assume you are reading this to learn about how to spend less time on your phone and don’t require any convincing on the idea.

~ ONE RULE TO RULE THEM ALL ~

Humans are an interesting creatures – so complex yet strongly controlled by simple forces. One of those forces is laziness that stops us from doing things that require effort. Laziness, although very dangerous, can be used for our benefits sometimes. Let’s apply laziness to stop us from wasting time on our phones even though that’s kind of contradicting. Phones by nature make things easier for us hence making us “lazier”.

Your phone will always be on your finger tips, ready to give you whatever you ask for. Nonetheless, we can still make our phones such that some things are easier while others are harder for us to access. It is your discretion though what you want and what you don’t want easily accessible on your phone. Most common time wasting apps are Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat – basically mostly social media apps and some games.

First step: Don’t delete the apps right away – it is not very effective because it is not that difficult to re-download them. And when that happens we feel defeated and stop trying. Instead, let’s build discipline and self-control.

Remove all those apps from home screen so every time you unlock they are not in front of you. Out of sight, out of mind! This will make you have fewer home screens only for your essentials app icons.

Also, a bonus, once your home screen is empty, you can finally show off the awesome wallpaper.

Remove unwanted apps from home screen

Without starting any wars between android and apple users, android phones do have some nice built-in functionalities to remove apps from our reach even further. Samsung phones allow to hide apps without deleting them. You can still search them and receive notifications – they are just not shown in your app directory.

hide the apps completely from your phone

If hiding apps feature is not available on your phone, you can also group them in to multiple nested folders. This will force you to do work to get to them and remember we are lazy and don’t want to do the work.

grouped apps require work to get to

Bottom line is to make it harder, not impossible, to reach those time wasting apps. We don’t want to never checkout Instagram or never get a message on Facebook; we just want to not be aimlessly opening up those apps and scrolling until our thumb is numb.

Make it harder to see, find and open the apps that waste your valuable time that you regret. Make it so that you have to work to get to those apps and then embrace the laziness.

For editorial related inquiries, please email admin@campushappens.com