How to stop scrolling all day and actually start doing productive stuff.
Actionable protocols to use your phone less and actually spend time on high ROI activities that will get you towards your goals.
I don’t have financial freedom, location freedom, time freedom or all these other cool freedoms that most gurus/influencers talk about nowadays.
But I do believe I am gonna get there someday. You know why?
Because I got some great, productive habits that I spend time on everyday instead of just scrolling social media and watching netflix all day like most other people.
Nobody gets rich overnight, nobody gets their dream physique overnight, nobody achieves anything overnight without putting in the work.
Everyone just believes that everyone else got successful overnight because that’s all they see on social media.
All the “life highlights” and none of the boring stuff where they are actually working towards their goals.
All the early mornings, or late night, or not going out on fridays or whatever.
Therefore people just write it off as getting lucky or whatever.
But behind the success there is all the small things that you do everyday that separate successful people from non successful people, no matter if you define success as money, health, love or whatever.
Like Lao Tzu said: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
So many people including myself, feel like they need the perfect plan to get started.
But in reality there is NEVER a perfect time to start, it’s just about starting and figuring out along the way.
That’s why I am writing this post to the STAGGERING zero subscribers on my substack here lol.
You know what they say:
“The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The next best time is today.”
Like I said, I ain’t rich or succesful (yet) but I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out that nobody reaches their goals by scrolling social media and watching netflix all day.
I think the first step on the road to success is eliminating the bad, unproductive habits you do everyday and replacing them with habits that are actually gonna get you towards your goals.
So here is how I stopped scrolling my phone all day and actually replaced it with good, productive habits like playing chess, working out, reading books, posting on social media, meditating and so on.
Habits that will actually get you to where you want to go in life.
It’s all about dopamine
The reason why you can’t focus on work or other habits that you know are good for you is simply because you are overstimulated 24/7.
Your brain is flooded with dopamine all the time from high-dopamine activities like scrolling social media, gambling, watching porn etc.
Therefore, when you actually try to do things that result in less dopamine, it’s extremely hard. Your brain isn’t getting the dopamine it’s used to, so it tells you “why don’t we scroll social media instead, that’s much more fun”.
This is why dopamine detoxes have become so popular nowadays. They “reset” your dopamine tolerance and makes things you normally find boring, like reading, studying, working, etc, fun again.
So when you actually start using your phone less, the productive habits that you know are important will actually become easier to do.
So this is what I’ve done to use my phone less and actually focus on good habits:
Make your phone as boring as possible
What I mean by this is a couple different things.
One of the first things I did was literally just to delete apps that I knew I was spending too much time on.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit etc.
If you keep these apps on your phone you have to use willpower every time you use your phone to not open them and get sucked into the doomscroll.
It’s like having candy in your house when you’re trying to get healthy and lose weight.
It just makes it 10x harder because every time you walk past that drawer you have to use willpower to not open it and start stuffing your throat.
If you just throw it out, you know you have to go to the store and buy some if you get the cravings which takes 10x more effort than just opening a drawer.
It’s the same with the addicting apps on your phone.
If they aren’t there in the first place, it’s 10x more likely you won’t think of them, go to the app store, search for them, redownload them, log in, and start doomscrolling.
So please, take your phone right now and delete the apps you know you waste too much time on.
Social media apps, games, whatever.
Another thing I would recommend doing is to make your home screen super minimal and none distracting.
This is my home screen. No distracting apps, just the essentials.
This is kinda similar to deleting apps that you know you waste time on.
When you just get everything distracting off the home screen you are less likely to open apps you know you shouldn’t be on.
We are so addicted to our phones that we literally just take our phone out and open it out of instinct. Without even thinking.
When you don’t have distracting apps on your phone screen, you have to consciously swipe to get to the “bad” apps.
This adds another layer of “protection” that you need to get by to start the mind sucking doomscroll.
I can’t tell you how many times I used to pick up my phone without even thinking about it, opening instagram and 10 minutes later realize what I had just done.
Now when I open my phone, I see this boring ass home screen and put it down again because there is literally nothing to do.
You can tell yourself that you’re just gonna keep your apps and your home screen and that you’ll just use discipline to not scroll social media and open other high-dopamine apps…
We all know that won’t happen.
And even if you can, why would you spend your limited willpower on not opening addicting apps.
You only have a limited amount of willpower everyday, so why not make it easier for yourself and actually use that willpower to do something productive like working out, reading or whatever, instead of spending it on not doomscrolling.
Who do you think looses the most amount of weight over the next 6 months. The guy who keeps the candy in the drawer and says he wont eat it or the guy who actually throws it out.
I know who I’m betting on.
Don’t keep your phone on you
Another thing you can do to use your phone less and actually spend your time more productively is to just not keep your phone on you.
First up, it’s a horrible idea from a health perspective.
You’re getting blasted with EMF’s all day long and destroying your mitochondrial health, your reproductive health and just your overall health.
More and more studies are coming out on EMF’s and their negative effects on reproductive health, sleep, cancer risks etc.
It’s a topic for another post so make sure you actually subscribe if you wanna be notified when I release my full EMF guide here on my newsletter :)
But in terms of productivity, keeping your phone on you 24/7 is also a bad idea.
Again, it’s the same analogy as trying to lose weight with a house full of candy and other unhealthy foods.
It’s so easy to pick up your phone when you know it’s right there in your pocket. When your phone is in your pocket you sometimes just take it out without even thinking about.
Just complete autopilot.
What we are trying to accomplish with all these tips is to make you conscious of the fact that you don’t want to use your phone.
When it isn’t in your pocket you consciously have to go find it before you can use it, which gives you time to actually think “do I wanna be doing this or should I maybe do something productive instead?”
Make it a habit to never keep your phone in your pocket, and I promise you’ll use it less.
Disable notifications
The average gen z person gets about 180 notifications on their phone every day. That’s one every 8 MINUTES.
How do you expect to lock in, enter flow state or just do any kind of long term, focused work when your phone is distracting you every 8 minutes.
I have disabled EVERY SINGLE NOTIFICATION on my phone that isn’t texts or calls (what a phone was actually meant to do).
Most people get notifications from all kinds of bullshit. New youtube video alerts, shopping deals, clash royale, instagram, food delivery apps and so on.
Just ask yourself: do you really need notifications from all these apps?
Probably not. All these apps just want you to spend more time on their app, so they can show you more ads and make more money for themselves. It’s all a business for them, while you’re destroying your life (kinda overdramatic but pretty much true).
The thing that’s so deadly about these notifications is the risk of getting sucked into the phone.
You get a notification from one of your friends new instagram post, you think: “hey I wanna see that”, so you open instagram, like the post, and before you know it you’ve been scrolling reels for 30 minutes.
It’s horrible for your brain and your productivity.
So actionable step:
Go on your phone, open settings, go into notifications, turn off notifications for all apps that can distract you. Be brutally honest. You should be turning off about 99% of apps and only really keep notifications on for apps like messages, whatsapp, phone and whatever else you use to connect with friends and family in my opinion.
No need to have notifications on for anything else, especially not brainrot apps like social media, games, etc.
Phone free zones
This is another thing that has really helped me reduce my screen time.
How many times do you go to the bathroom with your phone only to get sucked into the doomscroll and sit there for 30 minutes?
At least for me that happened a lot.
It’s crazy how we’ve become so addicted to these devices that we can’t even sit on the toilet for 5 minutes without our phones.
I’ve made an entire post about the art of doing nothing and why just sitting with your thoughts is so important in the modern world, you can read it here if you want:
Having zones throughout your house or the environment you live in where you don’t use your phone is really beneficial.
Bathroom and bedroom is what I do.
I never want to use my phone on the toilet cause I know how easy it is to just rack up 30 minutes of screen time throughout the day. The same goes for the bedroom. I never keep my phone in my bedroom cause it messes up my sleep and gives me the opportunity to scroll right before I go to bed and right after I wake up.
It’s horrible.
Think about it. You’ve just had about 8 hours of dopamine detox while you we’re sleeping, and now you want to blast your brain with dopamine right after waking.
By keeping your devices out of your bedroom you eliminate that opportunity entirely. Now you have to get out of bed before you can scroll, and from there it’s easy to remind yourself that you probably shouldn’t.
You can do whatever zones you like.
I also used to say that I wouldn’t use my phone in the gym, because you just waste so much time in between sets scrolling social media.
The gym is for getting in a focused workout, not scrolling your phone.
Unhook Extension
Now you use your phone less, but what about your computer?
That’s where the Unhook chrome extension comes into play.
This is basically just an extension that removes the distracting parts of youtube: the home screen, the video sidebar, shorts, comments etc.
It really helps you not doomscroll youtube after you’ve just made your phone boring lol.
Now there literally isn’t anything unproductive to do on your devices so what do you actually spend time on now?
Productive habits
There’s tons of actually productive habits that you can spend time on instead of doomscrolling all day. Here’s some of them:
reading
meditating
playing chess
drawing
sunbathing
exercising
walking
working
spending time with family
playing sports
watching high quality movies
and so much more…
I know you have hobbies that you just don’t feel you have time for.
I dare you to go check your screen time and then tell me you don’t have time to actually do healthy, productive things.
As I said, I ain’t rich yet, so I ain’t really the guy to give you advice on what to do to become rich/successful.
However, I do believe it is pretty easy to know whether you’re on the path towards success or on the path towards a shitty life you don’t like.
For example, look at these two people:
Person A wakes up late, doomscrolls tiktok for an hour, gets up and eats cereal breakfast while doomscrolling some more.
Maybe they work a job some days, but when they comes home they play video games, watches some netflix and you guessed it, scrolls some more tiktok. They stay up late, get horrible sleep and repeats it all the next day.
Person B on the other hand wakes up early from a great nights sleep, goes out and gets morning sunlight right after waking, then comes home to eat a very nutritious breakfast consisting of whole foods while staring into the air, reading an article or watching a podcast.
Then they spend time working towards their dreams, whatever that is. Trying different business models, making a youtube video, writing a newsletter or whatever. Then they exercise, eat a high quality lunch, reads, goes for a walk to get more sunlight, watches educational youtube videos to work towards their goals etc.
You get the point. Who do you think is more likely to become successful? Do you think it’s just all luck?
“That guy just got lucky with a business”
You can’t get lucky unless you try.
Person A never tries. Person B does.
You need to think of the person you want to be. What habits do they have, what do they spend time on throughout the day, etc.
Act like the successful person and it’s only a matter of time before you actually become successful. And I’m not just talking about success in terms of making money. It could also be success in health, relationships etc.
And there you have it. Stop scrolling and actually take a step on the thousand mile journey towards success.
That’s what I’m doing writing this newsletter to a email list that only contains my own email lol.
Thanks for reading and godspeed
— Kasper