What We're Reading Now
Reducing My Smartphone Dependence
27 March 2018
Janie read 6 Ways to Counteract Your Smartphone Addiction, by Larry Rosen, and was pleased to read some new strategies for reducing dependence on her phone.
Tags: balance, janie read
I’ve realized recently that I am more dependent on my phone than I would like to be. I’m not sure I would go as far as to say I’m addicted to it, but I do find myself reaching for it often. When I saw 6 Ways to Counteract Your Smartphone Addiction by Larry Rosen on the HBR blog, I was interested to read his recommendations.
Rosen has many good suggestions in the article. I wholeheartedly agree with his first tip, “Use ‘cc’ and ‘reply all’ judiciously.” I always try to be very deliberate about who I copy when I’m sending an email, but I’m not always as careful about this when I’m replying to an email. As Rosen says, “the more email you send…the more you will receive.” This is so true, and a good reminder for me to pay as much attention to my responses as I do when I’m the one writing the original email.
The other tip that really resonated with me is to “reclaim friend and family time.” Rosen’s advice here is to designate areas of the house where personal devices aren’t allowed in an effort to spend more time actually connecting with the people around you. He acknowledges that it can be hard to ignore your phone if it is sitting right in front of you with alerts going off. Banning devices from certain spaces of the house can help with this issue.
This suggestion is something I am planning to enforce more strongly in my home. We have had a loose rule that devices aren’t allowed at the dinner table, but I’ve been slipping on this lately, and I need to take a firmer line. It’s important to me to set an example for my children, and it feels a bit hypocritical for me to tell Charlie (my older son) to get off his iPad while I’m scrolling through my phone. This article was a nice reminder for me to put down the phone and pay better attention to how often I am reaching for it.
What are your strategies for becoming less dependent on your smartphone? If this is a subject that interests you, I recommend taking a look at Rosen’s article.
Comments
Our Comment Policy:
Our blog posts are only half of the conversation. What our readers have to say is equally important to us, and we're grateful for all the comments that continue the dialog.
To ensure that the discussion here is as useful as possible to all of our readers, please be respectful of our contributors and refrain from harassing, threatening and/or vulgar language. We reserve the right to screen and remove any comments from the site. If you have a question about a comment or want to discuss our policy, please contact us. We'll talk it over.
There are no comments for this entry yet.