As I pick up my phone and instinctively tap the TikTok icon, I’m confronted with an unusual headline written in bold: “Gambino Blocked TikTok.”
Below, it reads a longer message.
“As he was headlining a festival back in 2019, Childish Gambino urged his fans to live more in the moment: ‘Put your phones down, you don’t need to share this with anybody’ — Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino),” the social media blocking app read.
Members of Generation Z generally share one thing in common: excessive phone use. According to Harmony Healthcare IT, Gen Z Americans spend an average of six hours and 27 minutes per day on their cell phones. Whether you have an average daily screen time of two, four or even eight hours, phone usage dominates much of our lives without us even realizing it, and these hours add up quickly. For example, if you consistently spend two hours on social media every day, you can waste up to 18 years of your lifetime scrolling — that’s 18 years that could instead be dedicated to fulfilling work such as learning new skills, traveling the world and practicing altruism.
So what prevents us from putting our phones down? What is the intrinsic instigator of endless scrolling? It’s a concept known as nomophobia (derived from “NO MObile PHone PhoBIA”), or the fear of being without your phone. Essentially, nomophobia drives us to impulsively use our phones; as a result, this excessive usage often hinders our ability to complete important tasks and enjoy the pleasures of everyday life. Sure, there are the important tasks of paying attention in lectures and completing class assignments, but there are also the underrated pleasures of college life like exploring campus, visiting new places in Nashville and rewarding yourself with a well-deserved slumber after investing countless hours into an infuriating assignment. Fear not, though, for I have found an extremely helpful solution to the nomophobia epidemic: focus apps.
We’ve all heard of focus methods such as the famous Pomodoro timer or those silly little apps that are based around growing plants. However, I have historically had trouble with taking the Pomodoro Technique seriously. I would often work for ten minutes before getting distracted and lazing around as my unfinished assignments begged for my attention. As a result of this constant derailment, I had given up on focus strategies; however, at the end of last semester, I decided to give them one more try. I took a peer’s advice on a new method and downloaded a new app that allowed me to choose a set of apps to block every weekday for an eight-hour session.
For the first few sessions, I instinctively tried to open one of my blocked apps and was immediately met with a “block screen” that offered a motivating message, thus discouraging me from succumbing to distractions. These block screens ranged from inspirational to humorous, like the Gambino block on my TikTok screen. With each day that passed by, I felt that my brain grew more conditioned against reflexively opening these apps, regardless of whether I was in a focus session. Eventually, I could see through the weekly focus reports that I had significantly reduced my screen time and was on track to reclaim years of my life that would have been lost to mindless social media scrolling.
After I settled into the habit of eliminating phone-based distractions, I decided to give the Pomodoro Technique one more serious try. Immediately after getting into the mindset of working, I would start the 25-minute-long countdown timer, trying to be as productive as possible. There was a profound sense of comfort in knowing that I could focus for a set amount of time with the promise of a break, no matter how much I managed to get done.
It might feel daunting to invest time and effort into finding the right focus app and building the discipline to use it, but in the end, it’s absolutely worth it. Even for me, relying on just one focus strategy wasn’t enough — I had to combine two before I noticed a significant improvement in my focus and productivity. My personal favorites have been the Opal app for blocking mobile apps during the day, and the Pomodoro Technique for concentrating during work sessions.
Remember that everybody is different, and what works for your friend or your roommate may not work for you. There are a variety of focus applications out there. Each is unique and has much to offer. At the end of the day, devoting time to exploring these different focus strategies and discovering which ones help us unlock our highest level of focus is one of the most valuable investments we can make in ourselves.
