Here are some tips to make your smartphone smarter

The beginning of the decade became the age of the smartphone. With it, all our affairs, personal and professional, became compressed on one single black square. But with this hyper-connectivity also comes our fragmented attention spans, the fear of missing out and the eventual burnout from information overload. The smartphone, like the mind, is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Fortunately, here are few settings one can tweak on one’s smartphone to make it work for you better. (Image: Reuters)

Prioritise notifications from human interactions only: According to a Vox video, app developers design their notifications in such a way to mimic the experience of being contacted by a human being. This is one of the reasons why it becomes almost a reflex action to check one’s notifications. One can turn off notifications from all such apps by swiping down on the home screen, long pressing on the unwanted notification, and denying permission to the relevant app. (Image: Reuters)

Consider turning your colour settings to monochrome: The logos of several apps like Instagram have transitioned to warmer colour schemes. This is because the human eye is attracted to colours closer to red end of the spectrum. This is also the reason why notification bubbles are painted red, which create that attention grabbing sense of urgency. Tuning your smartphone to a black and white setup effectively neutralizes that knee jerk reaction to the notification stimuli, giving more control over how one would use one’s phone. (Image: Reuters)

Avoid apps that load content through infinite scroll: We tend to rely more on visual cues, as opposed to internal cues to stop consumption. This means that apps and platforms that provide a frictionless experience, like endlessly scrolling through tweets and videos, will subvert our sense of control often ending in bingeing. If we feel that we are spending too much time scrolling on a single app, that is a red flag, which should make us reconsider our usage on that app (Image: Reuters)

Keep a minimal home screen : Restricting the number of apps that we keep on our home screen to just the essential ones will reduce our temptation to spend extended time on them. Keeping apps like the calender app, a note taking app or a ride hailing app will keep us focused on our essential tasks. (Image: Getty Images)

Use the Do Not Disturb feature: For a complete detox, android phones with Version 6 or higher have a Do Not Disturb feature, which helps tune out unnecessary notifications from apps and phone calls. One can access it on the phone’s quick shortcut panel by swiping down on the home screen. The feature is customizable to cater to your downtime needs. The iPhone also sports a similar feature. (Image: Getty images)

Place your mails in one location: Switching between many apps to creates a small amount of cognitive load, no matter how small. This builds up to a certain amount of irritation, even frustration. It helps to set up all our mails to be received through a single app — Gmail can be synchronized with multiple email addresses, making things a lot more convenient. (Image: Getty Images)