Y’all. I just discovered the greatest thing ever. EVER.

Did you know that iPhone has a feature that allows you to monitor and limit your time spent on your phone? It’s called Screen Time, and it’s the best digital thing since sliced bread.

It allows you to decide during what hours your phone is in Downtime, during which all access to apps is limited, except for the ones you specifically designate as being always accessible. In my case, those are my Phone, Messages, Calendar, Emails, Music, Camera, Uber, and Google Maps. I’ve chosen to have Downtime from 11:15pm to 8:30am every day, to avoid me scrolling for hours before bed, or when I wake up, after hitting the snooze button 6 times. When 11:15 hits, my phone locks down the apps.

Better yet? Screen Time allows you to limit your daily time usage of any subset of apps on your phone (e.g. social media, games, entertainment, creativity, etc). In my case, I sink HOURS every day on social media , entire weekends go by and all I have done is seen all of Facebook and Instagram. I initially set my usage at 3h45 per day (including Messenger and Whatsapp). It’s been a week, and I have gradually lowered my limit to 2h45 and I intend to reach a 2h limit by the end of the month.

There are a whole lot of other great features for Screen Time, like programming limits for all phones in a family, or all Apple products belonging to a same person, so for readers who are interested, here is a good overview.

I discovered this feature after writing my 2019 New Year’s Resolutions post. One of my readers reached out to me to ask for more info about the book I’d featured, and I was going on and on about how amazing it had felt to disconnect from my phone and read an entire book in a weekend. My reader agreed that her life had improved drastically since she had given herself daily quotas, and shared with me the Screen Time feature.

It’s been a week since I’ve used Screen Time, and I am enamored.

• My sleep quality has significantly improved.
• I am getting to sleep earlier. While I am still hitting the sack at around the same time (11ish), the forced disconnection from my phone helps me fall asleep by 11:30pm latest, as opposed to my normal range of 12-1am.
• Funny thing, I am waking up earlier, around 6:45-7:30am, as compared to my previous range of 7:30-8:30am.
• The time it takes me between waking up and leaving the house in the morning is now 45mins or less vs 1.5-2hs before. I have nothing to scroll through, no messages to respond to, no notifications.
• Instead of showing up to the office between 9:30-10am (often having used an Uber to make it in that “early”, inevitable if I am only waking up at 8:30…), I showed up between 8:45-9:30am every day last week, without any stress or difficulty.
• It is a whole lot easier to leave the office at 6pm twice a week to make it to the gym on time when I am showing up at normal hours. One of the reasons I was missing the gym so often in the fall and January is because I would only clear the day’s “must have” deliverables by 6:45-7:30pm, by which time it was too late to make it downtown for my 7:15pm gym session. It isn’t just a matter of putting in 60+ hours in a week, a lot of my workload has implications on other people, so I have to get stuff done same day or else risk making my coworkers’ lives more hectic, something I hate doing. Our work is hectic enough without me adding to it.
• I have read 2.5 books in 8 days. I only managed to read a total of 3 books in all of 2017 and 2018. I can feel my concentration improving, and my interest in a broad range of topics awakening. I am learning once again, something I genuinely love to do (#nerd) but had felt unable to do due to my anxiety and depression, which made concentrating very difficult. It is still difficult. I had trouble reading 2 pages without checking my phone last week. By yesterday (3rd book), I can finish a chapter uninterrupted.
• Ive written 3 blog posts in 8 days. I didn’t do that once in 2018.

I feel much better.

Social media has a long history of making me crazy (IG tantrum with ICB, Beyoncé moment with Beaut). So much of my phone addiction came from a place of insecurity and FOMO. Because I was working too much, and very unhappy with my life, I desperately wanted to stay connected to the world and get validation that people want to be connected to me. Turns out, most of them don’t. When my phone hits 8:30am, I don’t have that many notifications. And that is ok. Because the people I am super close to text/call me anyhow. I might not see them often (although with my NYE resolution, I am gonna work on that), but I shouldn’t fill that void by meaningless interactions. Rather, I should focus on MY life, with MY goals and MY interests. Reclaim my power. Center myself.

(I shared this new development with my gym crew who are fed up of my broken promises to return to 2-3x/week training sessions. They were cautiously hopeful. As one of them sassily commented, “Vanilla, could this be the beginnings of maturity?” Bruh.)

I’m excited by this new chapter in my life.