Tips and tricks to make everyone’s New Year’s resolution just that much more achievable. 

With a new year brings an opportunity for a clean slate, a fresh start, a shockingly long list of resolutions that can quickly spiral into a glorified to-do list (not to brag but I have already bravely ticked off “look in attic” – there was nothing interesting in there). Slightly less achievable is one specific goal that has haunted every single New Year’s resolution conversation I have had this year, and last year, and the year before: to spend less time on my phone. Sound like you? Reading these very words on your wretched phone right now, perhaps?

Caveat: I am not a doctor or psychologist, but something much closer to Heath Ledger’s Joker dressed up as a nurse. No formal qualifications, but lived experience of true phone-induced madness. I have publicly penned both a sanctimonious think piece about leaving social media forever, followed two years later by a disturbed rant demanding to be included in the social media ban for children. Once, I sat cross-legged looking at my phone for so long that both my legs died, forcing me to army crawl out of the room like a Walking Dead zombie torso. 

With those credentials in mind, here are the things I have done to curb my phone addiction, in the hopes that we may all hit our KPIs of cutting down screen time in 2026. 

Treat it like a landline

Hark back to ye olde days of twirling a curly landline wire and being sequestered to a “phone zone” by keeping your phone tethered to one particular place in the house. For a while I tried to always keep my phone on its charger in the spare room, but it turns out that can evoke “vampire power” (and not in an alluring Edward Cullen kind of way). Instead, try using a lanyard or phone strap to moor your phone to a large immovable object, treating it less like an extension of your limbs and more like a desktop computer, a caged Gremlin or, funnily enough, a phone. For those of us who fret about every single person you’ve ever loved dying at every hour of every day, keep your ringer on loud to assuage compulsive checking (she smiled, Joker-ly).  

Get your dopamine hit elsewhere

After reading (on my phone) about how dopamine makes it impossible to put down our phones and how people are “dopamine detoxing” to curb their phone habits, I decided to try a version of it myself. The task is simple: seek out a dopamine hit first thing in the morning that does not come from your phone. That might be doing a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, watering the garden, walking the dog, reading a chapter of a book or delicately slicing a nectarine like Nara Smith. Does it work? Not sure, but always good to get a few chores done before swiping open the ol’ hell portal. 

Set yourself a doomscroll timer

Many of us will know the bewilderment of opening your phone to check a DM, being sucked into the doomscroll vortex, and before you know it the sun has set, the animals haven’t been fed and you are still slackjawed watching lip-reading videos of Leonardo DiCaprio at the Golden Globes. Give yourself a circuit-breaking jumpscare by setting an alarm before you open Instagram or TikTok, safe in the knowledge that a startling noise will wake you from your stupor in 10 or 20 minutes’ time. For iPhone users, I like the classic urgency of Alarm, or Sci Fi because it makes you feel like aliens will abduct you if you don’t put your phone down, or Bark and Doorbell because both make my real dog bark and then that gives me a new IRL problem to attend to. 

Delete apps after every use

Once you’ve been brought back to life by a synthetic doorbell chime, do yourself a favour and delete the app entirely. In a feeble attempt at friction-maxxing, I force myself to re-download Instagram/Trade Me (my preferred poisons) every time I want to use them, because having to open the app store and enter a password makes everything that little less appealing. I wait with fingers crossed for the day all this downloading leads me to being asked for my Apple ID and password, at which point I will have no choice but to detonate my phone and start a new life. 

Use a brick phone, or focus app, or dongle

Confession: I’ve found the addition of a new (or old) piece of tech to be the least effective phone addiction solution for me personally, perhaps because I hate spending money on something so bleak. I bought an old “dumb” Nokia for $69 from a deceased estate on Trade Me a while ago, but then got scared because it had 45 missed calls when I turned it on and I feared the former owner (now a ghost) may have unfinished business to attend to. 

Depending on your tolerance for twee, there are apps like Focus Friend or Finch, where you are rewarded for staying off your phone with a bird knitting you a pair of socks or a gift of “rainbow stones” for achieving certain goals. At the more serious end of things are no-nonsense screen time apps like Opal or dongles like Brick, which you physically tap to lock the distracting apps on your phone. I can’t deal with any of these, but maybe you can. 

Make it black and white

Much has been written about changing your phone to greyscale, including this from our own Duncan Greive: “The homescreen is duller than everything around it, where before the reverse was true. When I get in to do something, I get out a lot faster. I feel a much smaller rush when I see it in the morning.” It’s an easy change to make, generally through the Accessibility > Display settings on your phone, and really does instantly make everything look dreadfully boring. Beware you romantic nostalgia types, for it might backfire and evoke old Hollywood glamour eg doomscrolling at the gin joint in Casablanca. 

Respect the Good Screen

Speaking of cinema, I am committing this year to keeping my phone off the couch whenever I’m watching anything – even if it’s something as vapid as the Selling Sunset reunion. The act of second screening has become so ubiquitous that Netflix executives now give notes that scripts aren’t “second screen enough” and that characters must announce everything they are doing “so that viewers who have this programme on in the background can follow along“. 

Although news of my bravery is not going to get back to Tinseltown, I still see it as an act of resistance, and a powerful endorsement of one’s own cognitive abilities, to watch a TV show or movie without any distraction in 2026. That way, when I watch the finale of The Chair Company without even realising it’s the finale, I can wholly blame my own stupid brain and not my stupid phone for my confusion. 

Even better than that? Go to the Best Screen (the cinema) and turn your phone off altogether. 

Or even better than that… 

Leave your phone at home

When Beyonce said “I should have left my phone at home ‘coz this is a disaster” in 2009, she was not actually referring to a persistent suitor repeatedly calling her at the club, but sending an Interstellar bookshelf-style message to me on a glorious 30℃ day on Sumner Beach, using shade from the brim of my hat to watch the horrors of the world unfold on Instagram in 2026. It is important to stay informed, of course, but nothing is stopping you from leaving your phone at home for a few hours and taking a break from it all. You go first.