HOW TO STOP BEING DISTRACTED BY YOUR PHONE

In order to focus on your work, it is very important to keep all kinds of distractions away from you. There are two different kinds of distractions: the things that happen inside of you and the things that are outside of you. I think many students get distracted by their phones. More specifically: social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and WhatsApp.
In this article I am going to give you a couple of tips to stop being distracted by your phone so you can focus on your work more easily.

1. My first tip is to turn off your phone when you are working. Another thing you can do is turn on plane mode on your phone. That way, you can easily get access to your social media during a study break, without having to turn your device off and on the whole time. 
2. Another thing you can do when your friends/loved one keeps messaging you when you should be studying is just tell them that you need to work on school and that you will speak to them in a couple of hours. If they care about you, they know your education is important for your future and give you the space to work. You know you won’t get any messages during those hours so you can’t get distracted by your phone.
3. This is going to sound very childish but if you have no self control at all, ask someone (a parent or sibling or roommate) to hide your phone until you are done with doing your school work. It can be a little bit hard sometimes but you’ll notice that there aren’t a lot of excuses you can use to get your phone back before you are finished.
4. Let’s take a look at this from another perspective: why are we so addicted to social media ? Our brains get a positive (prikkel) every time we get a like or a message. It simply gives us a good feeling without having to work hard for it. However, do you feel happy at the end of the day when you know you spent your whole day on social media scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, knowing that there’s nothing new going on? I don’t. (Sterker nog), I feel guilty because I wasted my day with something that doesn’t make me happy. What does make me happy? Going to bed knowing I did everything I could, knowing that my day was productive and knowing I am one step closer to my goal. In other words, I have to get things done (school, exercise, take care of myself) to get a happy feeling at the end of the day. Think about this the next time you are tempted to grab your phone when you are studying. 
5. One thing that I like to keep in mind during studying is “if it’s that important, they’ll call me”. I turn off my wifi and internet so I don’t have any access to social media but if people need to tell something important they can by calling me. Now I do have to say, I never get called by people which means that whatever is going on on social media, whatever someone texts me is not that important.
6. My last tip is to go to social media and look at the things that are posted in a critical way. What do you see? Someone posting something funny, an article from a magazine, a selfie, a picture of someone’s kid, photos of someone’s amazing party. Now ask yourself? Are you really interested in these things? Does this make you happy? And most importantly, is this worth your time? Because of this I stopped using Facebook and my personal Twitter and Instagram, simply because they didn’t add anything to my life, they didn’t make my happy and I felt like I was scrolling through the same kind of posts/photos every day.
7. My last tip for you is to delete apps you can live without on your phone and only check them on another device. Now I do have to say, this only works when you are not addicted to that other device. For me that is my laptop. I don’t feel any need to turn on my laptop to check social media, which is the reason why I deleted my Facebook from my phone and now I only check it on my laptop (which is, in case you were wondering, less than once a week).

I hope that these tips help you to be able to focus more on your work or to give you the insight that social media isn’t all that and that an addiction would be silly.