21-06-2025
This Stupidly Simple Trick Helped Me Reduce My Screen Time by a Third
Earlier this year, I read a book that changed my life: Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing. First published in 2019 and gifted to me by a friend and colleague shortly thereafter (thank you, Emily Chan), I had initially resisted opening it because I'd assumed that it was a self-help book that would tell me to switch off and decamp to a yurt in the countryside, living off the land and staring at the sky for entertainment. But no: Odell's tome is actually an art book disguised as a self-help book. She is an artist, writer, and academic who uses examples within contemporary art to make us consider the mechanics of the attention economy—how it keeps us absorbed, addicted, anxious, and unable to fully focus on anything beyond our devices.
It is, very staunchly, not a book filled with tips and tricks, but one which seeks to reframe your thinking and make you more aware of the digital stimulants constantly competing for your attention—the ads glowing brightly in an attempt to catch your eye, the apps designed to keep you scrolling endlessly, and the bombardment of notifications that compel you to work through them before you can do anything else.
Since reading it, I've become so much more conscious of how I interact with my phone. It's all well and good to be on it, or on your laptop, when you actually have something to do, but what about when you don't? Why am I listlessly swimming through a stream of content when I don't need to be?
It's how I realized that I love the Letterboxd app—it's generally pretty dark, unstimulating, and free of notifications, which means I can pop on to look at it and easily pop out again. It's also how I reassessed my relationship with Duolingo. The latter is an app designed to keep users coming back daily, with its emphasis on streaks and leaderboards, but I came to understand that I could just tap into it when I wanted to learn something and then choose to put it away at other times. Yes, the app punishes me for not maintaining my streak (I have often seen the green owl mascot crying at my lack of consistency), but this is my small, intentional act of resistance.
