Less addictive

How to make your phone less addictive without making it worse

Almost every tip for a less addictive phone works by making the phone worse. That’s why they last about a week. There’s another way to do it.

8 October 2026

If you search for how to make your phone less addictive, you get the same list everywhere. Turn on grayscale. Turn off notifications. Delete social media. Move the apps off the home screen. Set screen time limits. If none of that works, buy a dumbphone.

I don’t think any of it is wrong. Most of it works, for about a week. But look at what every tip on that list has in common: it makes the phone worse. Uglier, slower, more annoying or less useful. The idea is that if the phone is bad enough, you’ll use it less.

Why making it worse doesn’t last

The problem is that you still need your phone. The bus ticket is on it. So are the bank, the map, the group chat and the code you need to log in at work. You use it for real things many times a day, and every time you do, you run into the fix. The grey screen when you’re trying to find a photo. The limit that kicks in while you’re reading something you actually wanted to read. The blocker that makes you wait while you’re standing at a ticket machine.

After a week the fix doesn’t feel like help anymore. It feels like a punishment for using your own phone. So you switch it off, and you feel like you failed. You didn’t. You picked a fix that makes the useful parts worse along with the bad ones.

What actually makes a phone addictive

Most of the time you don’t pick up your phone to scroll. You pick it up to check the bus, add milk to the shopping list or see what the weather is like. Then the home screen shows you twenty apps, a few red badges and the feed one tap away, while the thing you came for is three taps away. The feed gets there first, and a while later you still don’t know when the bus leaves.

So the addictive part isn’t the whole phone. It’s the few seconds after you unlock it. I wrote more about that in why you pick up your phone for one thing and end up scrolling.

If that’s the problem, you don’t have to make the phone worse. You have to make sure the thing you came for gets there before the feed does.

How to make your phone better instead

• Write down what you actually use your phone for. Not what you wish you used it for. For most people it’s about five things: messages, the map or the bus, the calendar, music, payments, maybe a shopping list. That’s your real phone. Everything else is extra.
• Put only those on your home screen. Move everything else to the app list, so you open it by looking for it. It’s still there, it just doesn’t call out to you every time you unlock. You can do this today on almost any Android home screen.
• Match them to the moment. This is the part a normal home screen can’t do. You don’t need the shopping list at 23:00 or your route to work on a Sunday. If the screen showed the list when you walk into the shop and the book when you get into bed, the thing you came for would be the first thing you see.
• Keep notifications from people, cut the ones from apps. This is the one popular tip that actually makes the phone better. A message from a friend is why you have a phone. “See what you missed” isn’t.
• Put your own words in front of the apps that pull you in. Not a lock, just a sentence you wrote yourself, like “It’s late. You said you’d read instead.” One tap closes it. It works more often than you’d think, because it’s you reminding yourself and not an app telling you off.
• Start with your worst moment. Don’t try to fix the whole day. Most people have one or two moments that always go wrong, like in bed or right after work. Fix one of them and leave the rest of the phone alone.

A quick test for any tip

Next time you read advice about phone addiction, ask one question: does this make my phone better or worse at the things I need it for?

Turning off app notifications makes it better, so keep that one. Grayscale makes your photos, your map and everything else worse, so it won’t last. A blocker makes the phone worse every time you need the blocked app for something real, which is why app blockers stop working after about a week. A dumbphone takes away the scrolling and everything useful with it, and most people go back to their smartphone the first time they need a map.

Where Sepamo fits

The third step is why I’m building Sepamo. It’s a home screen for Android. You tell it in a sentence what you want from your day, and it puts each thing on your home screen when the moment comes: the travel time to work on weekday mornings, the shopping list at the supermarket, the book at bedtime. The rest of the time the screen is quiet, and every app is still in the list, a swipe away. It doesn’t lock anything unless you ask it to.

You can do most of the list above without Sepamo. But if you’ve tried the fixes that make your phone worse and they didn’t last, try making it better for a week and see what happens.