Grayscale

Listening to Tristan Harris recently during a live (recorded) Wisdom 2.0 conference, he recommended that we can do a couple of things to reduce our addiction to our smart phones. If you haven’t seen his TED Talk, you will enjoy it. WARNING: After watching his talk you will seriously change your habits in connection with your technology.

  1. Switch off all notifications. By the way I’ve done that for the past couple of years and it’s made a huge difference in my attention and being present in the moment.
  2. Switch the colours on your phone to ‘grayscale’. Now this one I didn’t know about and you can find it in your accessibility section. For the iPhone go to general>accessibility>display accommodations>colour filters and there make sure you switch colour filters to on.

I like this hack a lot. Not seeing the colours of those apps they become meaningless in your life and you will switch your attention to the useful apps that you need to use, instead of the mindless apps that you don’t need, like social media apps.

I have to say it looks weird, but I’m getting used to it.

The other tip that worked for me is to remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and iPad. Now I can only access Facebook by going to a browser on my iPad or my Mac. This is a major game changer, I’ve also paused my activity on Facebook altogether.

Happy graying out!

Michael de Groot

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