How to forget about that phone ping!

Our relationship with screen is always intimate. While travelling in metro to waiting at the restaurant, even at apparel store’s trial room, people tend to check updates on their phones. A recent study has revealed that an adult human being tends to look into his mobile phone almost 198 times a day.

Kids below age of 8, get connected to mobiles or tablets for 2 hours a day and teens and tweens spend 7.5 hours a day looking at the screen. A Time magazine conducted poll reported one in four people check their phone “every 30 minutes, 1 in 5 people every 10 minutes.”

An online news analysis portal has reported that this looking into screens and keeping a tap of all updates in mobile result in decreasing of creativity. Midnight texting ruins sleep of others beside us and the light is harmful for our sleep as well. Not only do we check updates from friends and acquaintances or professional companions, software update requests, password reset and other notifications tends to eat into us. If you are subscribed to The Times of India, besides keeping yourself updated to current affairs you have to look into the screen almost 100 times a day.

The most obvious tricks to stay away from your phone is to keep the phone in your bag and don’t invite it to bed at night. While these can restrict you a bit from getting intimate with your phone there are ways to divorce your device for sometime in a day. All your promotional emails can be saved into a single digest by Web app Unroll.me. You can subscribe to a DIY app, IFTTT, which empowers you with creative control over the products and apps you like. There are recipes, which are simple connections between products and apps. You can instruct the device to what to when to do. Without taking out phone of your pocket, your wife will get the message that you are on your way home.
Android’s Google playstore has apps like Triggers that can run tasks automatically. With NFC extension, you can use a radio connection as well. National Basketball Association (NBA) in the USA are learnt to have cameras, which can assume from player’s movement when someone is tired or hurt and thereby inform the team physician. If some apps help in simple actions, other developed systems can trace your crisis and take necessary and relevant actions whenever needed. While smartphones engage us throughout the day, these little hacks will relive us of our precious man hour and someday maybe we can become as free as we were in the past.