How to unhook yourself from your smartphone?
Join us in leading a productive & distraction-free life
PRELUDE
Did you know that a large number of us have Nomophobia? It is the irrational fear of being without your mobile phone! Clearly, we’re all hooked to our phones that we can’t live without them.
How did we get to this point?
The deep-rooted attachment we share with our phones isn’t the fault of Apple, Samsung or Google. They can’t be held guilty for putting powerful computation devices in our pockets!
The real culprit is an excessive desire to collect micro-feedback about ourselves.
We’re constantly checking for feedback, and it’s addictive. The dopamine rush that accompanies each ‘like and comment’ has hooked us to our phones. It’s not the phone itself, it is these ‘micro-rewards’ we all want.
The constant interruptions like notifications, social media and checking emails every now and then, break your flow. They interrupt your concentration. They pull your focus away and make you have to start over.
According to researchers, our brains aren’t designed for processing things in parallel. Shifting from one task to other results in around 40% loss in cognitive function with memory intensive tasks suffering the most.
When you are pulled away from tasks, it takes time to readjust to them when you try to go back to them — up to 25 minutes in many cases.
Successful people prioritise! They focus! They disconnect from everything else to get tasks done.
Say hello to Focus Launcher!
So, we decided to create something that can unhook us from our phones! The Focus launcher is based on our in-depth knowledge about usage patterns on Android.
Focus launcher is designed to target and manage the 3 components of an addiction — motivation, ability and trigger.
As motivation is based on our brain’s love for dopamine and micro-rewards, it can’t be regulated effectively. Focus launcher aims to regulate the other 2 factors — ability and trigger.
The launcher is incredibly minimal in design. There are 4 predefined utility apps and you can add up to 4 of your favourite apps on the home screen. We turned off the notifications bubbles on these apps to reduce triggers. They together help reduce your ability to use apps and triggers that urge you to use them.
To access your other apps, you can swipe up on the home screen. We went ahead and put a 20 seconds delay on opening up the list of apps! According to Stanford’s research, delaying an urge to use something by 20 seconds can prevent a person from not using it.
PS. We also put in 5 skips per day for the weak-hearted folks!
To sum up, the focus launcher is clean, minimal and helps cut out distractions. It’s been designed from the ground up to help you unhook yourself from your phones.
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to de-addict yourself from your phone or know someone who’s is, please send this across to them. Hit the clap button 👏 if you loved the idea of a distraction-free launcher.
