Doable tonight.
Takes fifteen minutes.
No app, no subscription, no willpower. Just moving a few things around.
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Pick two places, not two times
Not "under two hours a day", but two places your phone doesn't go. We chose the bed and the dinner table. Pick whatever fits your life — the sofa during meals, the bathroom, the car.
Two is enough. At three or four you start negotiating, and then you're back where you began.
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Move your charger
This is the whole trick behind step one, and it's literally a single action. Take the charger out of your bedroom and put it in the hallway, the kitchen, the living room. Anywhere but next to your bed.
Your phone has to spend the night somewhere. Let that place make the decision for you.
Photo — to be takenWith step two. A charger in the hallway, an empty nightstand. Exactly the kind of quiet, ordinary image this needs — nothing staged. -
Put something else within reach
This is the step people skip, and precisely why it usually fails. An empty evening fills itself back up with a screen. Make sure something else is close at hand.
- A book on your pillow, not in the shelf
- An instrument out of its case, on a stand
- A puzzle or sketchbook left open on the table
Within reach is the entire point. Anything you have to go and fetch, you won't fetch.
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Turn on greyscale
Optional, free, and it genuinely helps against aimless scrolling. On an iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Colour Filters. On Android it usually sits under Digital Wellbeing or Accessibility.
Don't expect a miracle — after a few weeks you get used to it. But it costs you nothing.
If it fails, the setup was wrong. Not you.