New Launcher app to reduce phone usage

Note: This post was recorded and transcribed by Google recorder app. It has been heavily edited. I coulda' written this faster.

I was about to mention this in the post about e-ink device but i got carried away. This is about avoiding my phone addiction and trying to reduce my daily phone usage. As I explained earlier, buying an e-ink device to reduce my phone usage is not the direction I took. What do I do then to improve my self control? Figure out a way to use it less, and do productive things like reading and writing and walking and socializing and not going on instead of Youtube or reddit the first chance I get. I noticed when you there are icons on your phone homescreen, it's really easy to associate them with a certain emotion or a certain gratification. You just want to click the the red button because that's going to give me that dopamine rush.

So I installed a new launcher app on my phone, it's called Olauncher. My home screen now has only eight apps, on an otherwise empty-screen, no icon or logos, just words. And I can rename them. Now there are eight words on my home screen: 'forums' that's for the browser, 'mail' that's for the gmail app, 'message' that's for the viber app, 'map' that's for the google maps, 'radio' is for the google podcasts, and 'Tv' for youtube viewer. Youtube is no different from tv, it's video consumption... we like to make fun of people who were watching TV, like six, eight hours a day, but when it's netflix or youtube on your phone, we think it's different. Nuh uhh, it's the same and I'm going to treat it the same. 'Photo' goes to Google photos. There's 'book' which goes to my ebook reader. And then when I swipe left, it takes me to the camera app, don't have to add it to my home screen.  Love the feature to hide the app icons, and be able to rename the apps.

I changed Snapchat to be 'app to waste time', so I remember every time that I'm there consciously to waste time. And every time like I want to initiate doing something on the cell phone i need to remind myself, Okay, do I want to go to the forums where you want to go to mail, message map, radio, tv, photo or book or do I need to actually type in the words. I don't know if it's going to work for the long term, but right now it seems to be working.