Posting as this may be of use to others. The article led to me reorganizing my phone. The author recommends something called Infomagical, which is a five part

Posting as this may be of use to others. The article led to me reorganizing my phone. The author recommends something called Infomagical, which is a five part podcast aimed at reducing digital distraction. Haven't tried that yet, so I can't comment. But day two is phone reorganization. You can see a preview of the process here (not my site): http://www.kennethbills.net/blog/infomagical http://www.kennethbills.net/blog/infomagical Basically, you move all your apps to folders, move them off the home screen, and then open them with spotlight (I think Ok Google would be the android equivalent?) I've tried a few different distraction reduction methods, and none stuck. But this one appealed to me because that's actually exactly how I use my computer. And it works well. I just never thought to apply it to my phone. So I: 1. Moved all apps to folders, on the second page 2. Identified the four apps with the highest signal to noise. For me, that was whatsapp, messages, google now (I use it logged out), and calendar. Choose whatever you like – the important bit is that none of those have proven compulsive for me 3. I set my background to a nice nature scene near where I live 4. I also turned off most notifications, except those for messages and whatapp. None of the other phone notifications were actually important. For things like Slack and Trello, I usually see those on my computer. One guiding principle is that I should not be doing most things on my phone. I'm significantly more productive, say, answering email on my computer. So I should mostly do it there. I don't have the kind of work where I need to respond to anything within 1-2 hours, so this works. Obviously, I just tried this, so I can't know if it works long run. But it's what I already do on my computer, so I suspect it will work better than past attempts. My phone already feels calmer. Link to infomagical itself: http://project.wnyc.org/infomagical/ http://project.wnyc.org/infomagical/