So the first step is to figure out if you're actually wasting time, and how much of the time you spend is actually a waste. We live in a pretty strange world,

So the first step is to figure out if you're actually wasting time, and how much of the time you spend is actually a waste. We live in a pretty strange world, strange in a new way: we can interact with anyone in the world and we can learn anything we want with minimal effort. We can also endlessly be entertained passively if we choose to do that. You don't really think about it much, but before smart phones we had to set time aside and go sit at a desktop machine to use the internet, so you had to actually have something to do, or time to kill. Before the internet, we used to loaf around reading books, sipping on tea, flipping through television channels, and before television we used to have a ton of downtime. We didn't stress over the downtime that much because it was just a fact of life. Now that we can be productive in some way all the time due to the internet, we tend to think of the time we spend doing nothing as a waste, a new phenomenon brought on by phones, but it isn't really true. Human beings have always spent about half their waking hours loafing about. The ones that loved learning read book after book. It's never been easier to read book after book than it is now. So are you actually wasting time? What are you reading? Reddit has a very bad signal to noise ratio, especially as of late, but there's valuable stuff there. HN is quite a bit better, but still a lot of it will be uninteresting to some and interesting to others. I spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Books, articles, conversations on this site, and I've improved my vocabulary and command of the English language immensely, I've learned quite a bit on a wide set of topics, I can read Cyrillic and Greek phonetically and I can walk you through the particles in the standard model and what their properties are, I know a bit about information theory, and a bunch more. I couldn't dream of doing all this learning 30 years ago with just a public library available, it would've cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken me insane amounts of time to source the material. I'd be sitting around watching TV drinking miller lite believing things like "if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you" because I'd have had no way to easily check if what someone told me was true. It's likely you'd have wasted more time if smartphones didn't exist. This idea that every waking moment needs to be productive is incorrect. Before smartphone you'd probably spend most of your free time watching TV and drinking beer. So if what you do on your downtime is rewarding, it's not a waste. And if you're like me and you soak up information like a sponge and love learning, these devices are a blessing. Just decide not to spend downtime doing things that aren't rewarding to you, downtime is not the problem, being unhappy with how you spend it is. Learning interesting things is certainly not a waste of time, and neither is watching egirls on twitch if that's what you enjoy, because you'd have been watching married with children reruns otherwise.