If you have been planning to take courses, organize trips and eventually improve your English to a sufficient level, you can do this by reducing the time you spend on your smartphone. Tips Techno 24 and Rakuten Viber will help you get rid of the gadget.

Correct information diet

The basic principle is a kind of discipline in how we use our smartphone and how we consume information. If it happens in a chaotic and uncontrolled way, it will last for a long time, it will draw us in and we will not notice how much time we spend on the gadget.

It’s not easy to fight algorithms specifically designed to capture your attention, but it is real and it requires it.

• Reduce the number of news channels: The Viber team recommends that you scale your subscriptions and stick to a few key news outlets that you enjoy reading. Any major media outlet covers all the major news, so one or more should be enough to stay up to date without overwhelming yourself with information.
• Memes and new videos will wait until the evening: If you have trouble staying focused, a notification about a new post on your favorite blogger’s channel can throw you off track. Turn off notifications for “non-urgent” apps like social media or entertainment platforms. Focus on the really important channels of communication, like work chats, messages from loved ones, or critical notifications.
• Optimize your smartphone home screen: Distractions from notifications are half the trouble. Even the mere location of entertainment applications on the home screen of a smartphone can cause a “machine” reaction to scroll through the feed. If your main work tools are messengers, mail, and, for example, Google services (cables, documents, etc.), leave only these programs on the first page.
• Get into the habit of tracking time in apps: With built-in tools for iOS and Android, you can track time spent in different apps and even set limits. Use Screen Time on iOS or Digital Wellbeing on Android to see how much time you spend in apps.
• Add phone-free activities to your scheduleIf it’s not on your calendar/notebook, it doesn’t exist — familiar? To strike a healthy balance between “screen time” and offline activities, set aside smartphone-free hours in a journal, planner, or whatever tool you use for your to-do list for the day. The next task is to try to treat these hours the same way you would treat other essential tasks for today. This will naturally reduce your gadget time.

How do we “blend” time on the smartphone and how can we help it?

In a 2023 study, Viber messenger users shared what they spend the most time on: communicating with family and friends, reading the news, group chats with coworkers, neighbors, classmates, etc. The team analyzed what could take up the most time, taking into account the most common activity on the application. Rakuten Viber also reminded of features that will help better organize these chats.

Viber features that will help you control information / Photo: Rakuten Viber

Artificial intelligence will help you not to miss anything important

Scrolling through all the notifications can take a ton of time that could be 100% better spent. A “chat summary” can simplify this task. This feature uses OpenAI’s artificial intelligence to analyze and summarize the content of group chats. Using it, you’ll get a brief summary of the conversation without having to re-read it.

Personal matters in conversations with loved ones distract you during working hours and vice versa.

They will help separate work and personal life Folders for chats. In total, you can create up to five, each for different needs and tasks. For example, one for chatting with friends and family, a second for news, a third for interesting channels, and a fourth for work. This makes it easier to navigate a group of chats and plan your time for them.

Important links and documents are lost among other messages

You can save important messages from a colleague on vacation, files, instructions, or a link to an online course that you can’t reach – everything is possible in “Notes”. It’s a “chat with yourself” where you can forward all the information from other recipients and leave reminders. Once the task is completed, notes can be crossed out or deleted from them, just like any message in a regular chat.

Automated emails that you don’t really want to do manually

You can use the mailing list to send the same message to multiple people at once. Your invitation will be sent to everyone in the individual conversation, without a group chat or a “mail” sign. There can be up to 50 recipients, so the solution is suitable for even the loudest drivers.

Today, giving up the phone and messengers for a long time is possible only in exceptional cases, for example, on vacation (and even then the news will not be left alone). The tips mentioned will help you improve your concentration and plan your day more efficiently. After all, this is an opportunity to devote a little more time to offline life.