 So the average human spends over three hours a day on their phones. That's 12 percent of each of her days. And if you take that over a span of a year, that's 45 days taken up by just one single device. Imagine what you could do with an extra 45 days in your life. That is extra amount of time to build a new habit, read more books. Or if you want, you could also watch the entire Star Wars saga 48 times. Today, we're going to talk about how to get some of that time back. Let's get into it. All right, guys, welcome to the MD journey, a channel all about helping students succeed on their journey with less stress. My name is Lux, an internal medicine physician and resident in training, making videos just like this twice a week for people just like you. So if you're new to this channel, consider liking the video to support the channel as well as subscribing and hit that notification bell to know when new videos go out. But today we are talking all about how to minimize our time on our phones and from getting distracted and get some of that time back so we can do things that we enjoy and also can help us grow and become productive. And as I mentioned in the intro, we are spending almost 45 days in a whole calendar year interacting with our cell phones and our devices. Imagine what you could do if you just got a half of that time back. So in this video, I want to give you six tips that you can use. And I use myself as a busy position to make sure that I am not spending additional and excessive amount of time on my cell phone. First and most important thing is you need to turn off your push notifications for your social media and email apps. They found that the average human gets about 45 notifications on their phone every single day. And it's been shown that both the auditory and visual stimuli causes to have a dopamine surge to want to have the urge to look at her phones, but also distract us and lose some focus and flow from whatever activity we've been doing. But here's the kicker and the reason that you need to turn off your notifications immediately. Half of the time you get a notification, you actually don't even do anything. So you may get a notification that somebody like to post or somebody posted a story on Instagram, but you may not actually go out of your way to do anything, but instead it still diverts your attention and your focus from whatever you were doing. One of the best ways to minimize the distraction that your phone is providing you is to just turn off those annoying and pesky push notifications. And if you're unsure how to do it, I'll go ahead and link an article for both iOS as well as Android on how to turn off your push notifications. Tip number two, I use this a lot as a physician myself. And that's simply to power off your phone during your busy and mentally draining task. Now, I know initially it can cause the feeling of feeling disconnected from the world or what if there's an emergency and the concerns and stresses that come from that? But you can do a simple test to realize this is actually not true. You can have your phone on in your pocket, but ask yourself over the last two hours, how many important text messages did you get? How many emails did you get that you probably could have waited more than a minute or two or two hours to actually respond to? And the simple exercise allows you to understand. While there are people in situations that are depending on you, they're not always dependent on you 24 seven. So the ability to power off your phone and completely remove all distractions can definitely improve your productivity. But if you're not able to commit all the way to a simple power off, then they do not disturb mode for at least a few hours. While you're doing your most important task can do the trick. Getting into tip number three, I actually use this every single morning for my morning routine. That's simply to leave your phone in a different location altogether. So when I wake up every morning, I usually will leave my phone in the bedroom or I'll leave it on the counter, usually powered off. And this extra distance between both you and your phone actually increases the threshold of what's required to get your attention and distract you. For example, while the phone may be in your hands, it may be inclined to look through social media or your emails every few minutes. But if it's sitting elsewhere and turned off, the likelihood that you're going to want to turn it off and do that is very low. Tip number four is to have an anti distraction app ready. Now, if you're unfamiliar, these are different apps that are created for both iOS as well as Android users can allow you to have the capability of blocking the usage of certain apps, websites, URLs during specific time. So you can use these apps to basically say, I'm going to start working on for the next one, two hours. I'm not allowed to get on social media, Facebook or emails. And there's a variety of different apps that you can use. Two of my favorites specifically are StayFocused and Forest. Now currently on my phone, I'm using the app Forest. Now the way Forest works kind of treats distraction like a game where you're winning is long as you stay focused. So you log into the app and you start off with a small seed. And essentially the more time you stay focused and leave the app on the screen and not divert your attention towards other distracting apps, your small seed will turn into a tree, which will turn into eventually a forest, hence the name. Now, as soon as you click off the app and go towards a different app that may be distracting like social media or emails, all of your hard work and those trees that you grew, start to die away. So it's a nice visual and mental motivation to make sure that you're staying away from the common distractors that are on your phone. And if you want more examples of some anti-distraction apps that you can use, go ahead and check out the ones down below. Now, before we get to the last few tips, I want to know what your best tip is to minimize your distraction on your phones and drop those in the comments section down below. Also, before we move on, if you haven't done so already, make sure you hit that like button and support both the video and the channel. Getting into tip number five is to use homepage minimalism. Now, essentially what this means is you want to keep your homepage of your cell phone as distraction free as possible, ideally with as little apps as you can, and particularly you want your social media and email apps to ideally be off, if not very hard to reach. So I'll go ahead and show you kind of what my phone looks like here. But as I'm scrolling, you can see that I kind of have different buckets for different parts of my life. So Google has some of the major apps that I use like Google Drive, the Google Play Store, Google Maps. And as I mentioned, I'm also a physician. So some of my most commonly used apps are things that I use for patient care. In addition, I have various forms of emails and accounts that I have to use both as a physician as well as my personal life. And then to round it out, as I mentioned, I use Forrest as my anti-distraction app. I use Keep to keep a lot of my mental notes. I'm Scribe is my current app that I'm using to help me read more books. And whenever I'm training for my marathon, I use the Nike Run app and YouTube just because YouTube, as you can see, as I'm kind of scrolling through my home screen is essentially this, the day, the weather and then a calendar because I kind of need to know where I need to be as a physician. But there's not much else there. There's no Instagram, there's no Facebook, there's no LinkedIn. All those apps are still in my app library. So when I need them, I can get to it. But it forces me to have an extra step to go ahead and open each of those apps. But not having them on my home screen creates an extra step, which makes it less likely that I'll get distracted. Tip number six. I actually used to use this when my phone was a big distraction, especially during vacation time, is to make your phone black and white. One of the most attractive parts of our phones as well as some of the distracting apps is the contrasting colors and it's appeasing to the eyes. Imagine going through Instagram and just seeing everything in black and white. I'm sure some of the images would look great, but otherwise it's probably not going to be so interesting in your desire to actually check your phone routinely. It's going to be much less. And there's very simple ways of doing this on both iOS and Android. So again, I will link those articles down below. Now, as a bonus tip, I know many of you guys are watching this and you still have that craving and desire to use your phone. And so one of the things I'd recommend is to actually space out when you start to use your phone. So for example, in the morning, you may say, I'm going to use my phone every five minutes. So it can sit next to you five minutes may not seem like a big step. And then you can check your phone in five minutes once you get there. And then the next time you say, well, it's going to be 10 minutes from now on, then 20, and then you go up by the increments you want. But essentially you start out with something small where you can tell yourself, I can not look at my phone for a minute, my phone in the counter and I'll check it in a second. And then you keep incrementally increasing whatever that time span is in between your tasks. And eventually you will find out that the later and later in the day where you're more likely to get distracted and be on your phone, your time span increases and you've already kind of built up momentum realizing you don't need your phone. And there's probably not much that's going on while you're not looking. So try to space out your dedicated phone time throughout the day within your comfort level and build that motivation and momentum to minimize how often you use it. But those guys are some of my favorite tips on how to minimize using your phone every single day. Hopefully you guys can use some of these tips to regain some of those missed three hours a day or 45 days and a year. Maybe enjoy some Star Wars. But before you leave, make sure you go ahead, comment down below with any questions or comments as well as hitting that like and subscribe button. If you want more videos like this one, we are putting two videos per week for people just like you. So make sure you hit that subscribe as well notification bell, but otherwise check out the other top videos that we have here on the corner. And thank you so much for stopping by and for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours. See you guys in the next one. Peace.