Will is Not the Way — How to Actually Reduce Screentime with the Science of Nudges

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Over and over again, I tried to get rid of my phone. I hated the way it commanded my attention at all hours of the day, yet I felt powerless to do anything about it. I would try, and sometimes even succeed, for days or weeks at a time to limit my phone use. But eventually, I’d get tired of fighting myself, and would wind up 2 hours deep on a Reddit scroll wondering where the time went.

At the time, I thought if I could be more disciplined, if I could just want it badly enough, eventually I would overcome it.

But was that really what was holding me back — wanting it badly enough?

The thought of spending ~1/6th of my life scrolling (4hrs/24hrs), just half of what I spend sleeping, filled me with existential dread. Even that wasn’t enough to stop me, though. Will could move me, but not sustainably. This problem needed better solutions than discipline and grit.

Funnily enough, the brilliant PhD and author of Grit, was the one who pointed out to me that grit* was not the way.

Angela Duckworth et al. in their paper “Situational strategies for self-control” shared this insight which became a turning point for me:

If she was right, that self-control is more about avoiding temptation than exercising willpower, I had been going about my phone habit all wrong. The question wasn’t “how can I want it more and push myself harder?” it was “How do I arrange my life to avoid encountering the temptation of my phone in the first place?”

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Avoiding Will Exhaustion: Building an ecosystem of self-administered nudges

So, I began my search for the means to avoiding temptation sustainably.

I hopped from one article to another until I stumbled upon “Nudge” by Thaler and Sunstein. In this book, which turns out to be a key piece in modern behavioural economics, the authors introduce a clever approach called Nudges. Think of nudges as gentle pushes that help steer us towards better decisions, without forcing the decision on us. They’re smart tweaks to our environment that play on the quirks (formally: biases and heuristics) of how humans make choices, making it more likely for us to pick the healthier or wiser option.

Essentially, instead of trying to force myself to read a book rather than scrolling Reddit through brute willpower, I could make reading more accessible and more fun, while simultaneously making scrolling more boring.

The smallest tweaks can have an impact. For example:

1. I can make it easier to choose to read by putting my book out in the open by the couch where I relax.
2. I can make it harder to choose to scroll by leaving my phone across the room where I can’t reach it.
3. I can make it less fun to scroll by turning my phone screen black and white

What’s remarkable is how small these nudges are, but how effective they can be at various scales. Researchers in behavioural-economics, psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction, have used tons of these nudges to help people be more intentional. They’ve used nudges to increase the number of vegetables shoppers buy at grocery stores [3], help students start their homework earlier [4], and help people decrease phone screen-time [5]. Nudges seem to be a consistently effective way to change behaviour for the better without exercising will.

Beyond the science, productivity experts have been leaning on nudge-like interventions as an alternative to grit and raw discipline for a while now. The immensely successful self-help book Atomic Habits by James Clear is founded on the idea of building habits by making the choices you want to make easier, and the choices you would rather not make harder, over time. Clear writes on his blog:

How might we make something more obvious, attractive, and easy? By deploying nudges!

It’s not just Clear either, Ali Abdaal’s recent book Feel Good Productivity, Make Time by Jake Knapp (Author), John Zeratsky (Author), and more. All leverage, if not make core, the idea that you can make the choices you want to make easier or more enjoyable and in doing so, make those choices easier to sustain.

At this point, I was sold. If will was not the way, maybe nudges were. So begins my journey to nudge myself out of my phone and into my life.

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Increase Friction: Dumbing Down my Phone

My first nudges came from the dumb phone trend. Modern smartphones and apps are meticulously crafted to capture and hold your attention in habit-forming ways (for more on how, see Dark Patterns and Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products) To avoid the temptation smartphones and apps have been designed to manufacture in their users, I needed to break out of their design.

It was at this point I wanted to go all in and buy a dumb phone like the Nokias of old. Alas, there were complications. One in particular.

Everything needs 2 factor authentication (2FA) now. And how do we authenticate? Phone verification. This would’ve been fine if 2FA stuck to texting passcodes to me, but the University of Toronto — where I work — has started using a mobile app now to verify via push notification. My solution required a middle-ground. I couldn’t swap out my phone for a totally dumb phone, I had to settle for dumbing down my existing phone. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do this.

Decrease Obviousness: Turn off Notifications

Notifications are nudges designed to pull you out of whatever you’re currently doing. They do this by yelling at you at any time of day, “I have urgent news for you! Jenny just messaged you on Instagram and also your favourite YouTuber posted a short!” Once the notification hooks you, you’re in for an hour of YouTube and Instagram stories. It’s a nudge alright, but a nudge for Big Tech’s goals, not mine.

If you do nothing else from this list, I recommend you silence your notifications. They’ll still be there for you when you choose to look at your phone, but they won’t force the choice on you anymore.

Personally, I started by silencing my phone, but I found the quiet of a world without constant pings so much better that I turned off notifications altogether. Everything that matters on my phone will be there when I decide to check it.

However, there is a caveat. As you’d suspect, I missed things.

I missed conversations with my friends on Discord, emails by the hundreds, and phone calls from family and friends. Some of this was fine, some of it was not. So I found workarounds. I caught up on conversations in the evenings, scheduled two daily time blocks to batch check emails, and set iOS to make it so that my partner’s calls did give me notifications and weren’t set to silent — I can miss a telemarketer’s call , but I draw the line at my girlfriend.

A Dumber Phone Doesn’t Have to be All or Nothing

I want to focus and have control over my attention and time, most of the time. But there are some circumstances in which I would like to be distracted, and there are people I would like to have the power to distract me. I’m sure you do too.

Being completely unreachable isn’t a luxury most of us can afford; however, we can limit who can reach us and when, to varying extents.

If you’re a parent, you probably want your kids to be able to reach you under any circumstances. If you’re a systems administrator for a hospital, you may need to be contactable at all times if critical systems go down.

Some things and some people are our grand focus even when we’re not focusing on them at the moment. We can give them access to our attention without giving the same privileges to the entire digital realm.

As an exercise, I recommend going through your installed apps and your contact list to decide which of them really need the ability to notify you and which can wait for you to go check on them.

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Decrease Appeal: Grey-scale and low-power mode

Once I’d turned off notifications, I found myself less likely to open my phone, but once I did, I still got sucked in. I needed to nudge myself to find it less appealing. That’s when I found out about two phenomenally boring features: the grey-scale colour filter, low-power mode.

Low-power mode slows down your screen and makes applications run slower (it limits the juice the CPU is allowed to draw, so it simply can’t run that much stuff that quickly). As a result, everything is less responsive and slick. It just feels icky. And that’s precisely what I was trying to achieve.

To spice things down even more, I added a colour filter that makes my phone black and white. This is a built-in feature on the iPhone and I imagine on Android as well.

In the accessibility settings under Display & Text Size you can add a colour filter. They have many options for various kinds of colour vision deficiencies (Yay for accessibility features), but I just set it to black and white.

Surprisingly, this had a massive impact on my phone usage. My phone had become so boring to look at and so frustratingly slow that when I did use it, I got what I needed from it and got the hell out.

With these two settings in place, I’d replaced the vibrant speedy screen of my shiny iPhone with a dull, grey, slow brick.

Remove Temptation: Uninstall

Notifications and vibrant screens help suck you in, sure, but it’s the apps that keep you there. So, the next step was to get rid of them.

Different apps are more difficult to uninstall for different people. For me, it was Discord that was toughest. I love chatting with my friends and keeping up with them. Also, any time we went out, Discord was how we coordinated.

For you, it may be Instagram where your friends chat, it may be Reddit where you’re an active part of a Subreddit. Whatever it is, though, there are viable alternatives.

The compromise I found was uninstalling the apps on my phone, but leaving myself access on my laptop. This way, I could still access Discord to chat with my friends, but only when intentionally seated at my computer. On the rare occasion I wanted to use Instagram, like when my partner told me she had sent me memes, I could go view them from the browser version. This offered three benefits:

1. The web browser versions of these applications are usually less optimized and less algorithmically fed which makes them less addictive.
2. Your phone is always with you, your laptop likely isn’t, and even if you carry it in your backpack, it’s a pain to just whip out at the bus stop because you’re bored.
3. You still get to use the parts of the application you want, like messaging.

This change drastically reduced my doom scrolling time. I stopped pulling out my phone on the bus except to pick a podcast or listen to music, though I found that sometimes I’d just sit with my thoughts. If I was meeting up with friends I just let them know “if you need to reach me, text me instead of discord or instagram.”

To be clear, there are still times when my will fails. Sometimes I’m terribly bored and I’ll reinstall Reddit for a bit. But when that does happen, it’s usually short-lived. Thanks to the black and white screen, and lack of notifications it’s just not that satisfying to use the apps, and my phone doesn’t remind me to use them, so I’m less likely to build up the app habit. Most of the time, I delete the app after that session and wonder why I’d started in the first place.

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When Will Fails: One sec

While all of the previous nudges worked wonders for me, I still found at my most bored times, my brain would find clever ways to get its cheap dopamine fix or satisfy its anxious “but what if I’m missing something?” self-talk. The workarounds in question? The browser app, slack, and email.

You don’t need an app to get you to Reddit, Instagram, or Youtube. Sure the browser version sucks to use, especially on mobile, but when you’re desperately bored, anything will do. Worse, I had to keep email, slack and the browser on my phone for work.

This is where One Sec came in. One Sec is an app that adds just a sprinkle of friction between you and your app. It does this by creating a 5-second delay when you try to launch an app that you’ve flagged as distracting. A black screen comes up says “take a deep breath.” and once the 5 seconds is done it asks “do you really want to open this app?”

That short nudge was enough for me to ask myself “why do I want to open this app? Is it because I actually need/want to, or was it just an impulse?” If it was an impulse most of the time I chose not to open the app afterall. If I did need to use the app for work communications or to access a 2-factor authentication email, 5 seconds didn’t inconvenience me enough to lose anything important.

After using One Sec for a year, I can say without a doubt it is a brilliantly designed nudge that actually keeps me out of my phone and in the real world.

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Extending from Phones to Life: Designing an Ecosystem of Nudges

In this article, I focused on the set of nudges I use for reducing phone screen time from 4 hours to about 20 minutes per day. Best of all, these nudges create sustainable changes in my behavaiour without exhausting my will. It’s simply easier and less appealing to use my phone than to read, spend time with my partner or friends, go for a walk, or whatever else I actually want to do.

So, with such great success, why stop at just screen time?

We make thousands of choices every day, all of which make up the totality of our lives. Why not give ourselves a little help choosing to do what we actually care about?

From reading more to calling my friends and family more often, from convincing myself to start scary projects to taking healthier breaks, I’ve started using nudges to shape my environment so that it affords me more of what I care about and less of what I don’t. I’ve started calling this stacking of nudges in all domains of life Nudge Ecosystem Engineering— the practice of constantly conducting little experiments to find the nudges that helpyou do more of what you mean to do and less of what you don’t.

It took me a year of experimenting to get my screen-time from 4 hours to about 20 minutes. Not only that, I needed an entire toolkit worth of interventions to keep my phone time down — one alone never would have done it and I never would have been able to follow through with all of them at once. It was a slow, iterative process that gradually moved my choices, and it was entirely worth it.

To explore the use of self-administered ecosystems of nudges further, I’m making it the focal point of my research at the Intelligent Adaptive Interventions lab at the University of Toronto and sharing my day-to-day applications of nudges in a bi-weekly newsletter and blog called A Little Better.​

You can find it at ALittleBetter.org and join the bi-weekly email newsletter here.​

In the coming years, I hope to find more and more ways I can make the life I really want to live, easier to choose through Nudge Ecosystem Engineering. If you join me at the newsletter, I look forward to becoming A Little Better with you, week by week!

Cheers,
Nathan Laundry, MSc.
PhD Student @ Intelligent Adaptive Interventions Lab — UofT

References

• [1] Duckworth,A. L., Gendler, T. S., & Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational strategies for self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(1), 35–55.
• [2] Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
• [3] Almeida, C., Azevedo, J., Fogel, A., Lopes, E., Vale, C., & Padrão, P. (2024). Effectiveness of nudge interventions to promote fruit and vegetables’ selection, purchase, or consumption: A systematic review. Food Quality and Preference, 101052. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2024.101052​
• [4] Bernuy, A. Z., Zheng, Q. Y., Shaikh, H., Petersen, A., et al. (2021). Investigating the Impact of Online Homework Reminders Using Randomized A/B Comparisons. SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Pages 921–927. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432427​
• [5] Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(8), Article e2213114120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213114120​

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