Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Am I Phone Addicted?

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Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/35a
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed. When I wrote this post, I was only 17 years old!

How I overcome my secret addiction with this app

I hate reading articles about doing a “electronic detox-week” or something like this. I need my phone in almost every life situation. Whether it’s about searching for the opening hours of shops I need to go to, to ask other students something or to research some facts, I need to learn for my final exam (next week 😂). Doing a detox wouldn’t help.

But I feel it, that I sometimes want to reach to my phone without a reason. When I’m bored or when I don’t want to do the things I currently want to do. It somehow sucks, because it takes away my attention and makes me loose my focus.

The first step I did was installing the so called app Forest, where you can plant tress. Virtual trees of course - but also real trees, if you planted enough virtual trees. It sounds stupid, but you really don’t want these trees to die, because you switched to your favorite social network app, just because you’re brain-fucked or bored.

If you are in my situation too, I really recommend this app for you - no sponsored advertisement here, just my upright opinion! This app didn’t save me completely from losing focus, because there are other factors too, but it makes it at least a bit harder.

Another solution

If you don’t want to install yet another app, that’s fine too. I heard about another trick, but which I didn’t tried yet — god knows why I didn’t do it. But the “20-seconds-rule” sounds cool too. The trick is, that you put everything, that might distract you to a place, where you need a minimum of 20 seconds to reach it. For example put your phone on a wardrobe or in another room. But of course this only works, if you don’t need (and need is not equal to want) to use your phone for your tasks.


This was just a short text to tell you a bit about my current situation and to tell you my experiences 😬. And I swear, I’ll do something like a digital detox after I finish my final exams!

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