After reading the books Grace Not Perfection and A Simplified Life last December, I simplified many areas of my life, including my phone. Those bookss were my inspiration to find peace in simplification. However, this past month, of the biggest distractions I’ve had to being productive, to spending true quality time with my family and to getting all my homesteady reading accomplished, has been my phone. I find that I’m frustrated with myself for allowing this to happen again.
Even though I once again found my phone cluttered with apps that aren’t necessary, I still had used the principles I’d learned from the books when installing them. This included turning off notifications and moving necessary apps I did not frequently use away from the home screen. I turned off notifications for everything but phone calls and texts, and Emily Ley even recommends turning off texts too!
The biggest time suck? Farmville 2. Ya’ll, for a homesteader that doesn’t have her homestead established yet that game is addicting. Yes, I know it’s not accurate at all and there are many other more productive things I could be doing, but that didn’t stop me from playing while walking around in the yard with my husband and our pups just yesterday. I have never been that person before. And I didn’t like it.
So I changed it. My tech was starting to take away from my family time and my productivity. Today, before writing this article, I went through my phone and carefully dissected each app. Do I use it often? Do I actually need to use it often?
The first thing that went was Farmville. Next, I found myself with 6 photo apps, when I only use the camera and 3 others from time to time. So the extras were quickly trashed. There were more shopping apps on my phone than I’ve ever had as well. Not only are we building a house and need to save money, but I also only use Amazon and Ebates regularly. So out the others went.
So on and so forth I went until all the fluff was gone. I even deleted my payment information from Amazon to make it less convenient to purchase items I may not need. Things with frequent little red notification bubbles (even though alerts were turned off) went to the third page where I could no longer see them. Yes, that’s right, I said THIRD. Third, because I put all the apps I use daily, or at least weekly, on the second page.
My home page? It is reserved for me to rotate favorite photos of my husband and I. It is reserved for what should be most important, and what I’m going to make sure is.
