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How to Make the Most of Your Phone Time with Blinkist

We spend hours every day looking at our phones—but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. The Blinkist app turns phone time into time well spent.
by Vanessa Gibbs | Jan 7 2022

Just one look at Apple’s “Screen Time” feature can show you how many hours you spend on your phone each day. If you’re anything like most people, it may be a lot.

According to a 2021 survey by Statistica, almost 50% of respondents said they spend an average of five to six hours a day on their phones. Over 10% said that number is seven hours or more.

But that doesn’t have to be an entirely bad thing. Spending time on your phone can help you relax and kill time on the go, but what if it could also help you learn new things and discover life-changing ideas? With the Blinkist app, it can.

Blinkist gathers key insights from non-fiction books and shares them as 15-minute explainers. You can either read or listen to these explainers, and you can choose from 5,000 titles across 27 categories like entrepreneurship, psychology or mindfulness.

“When we started most apps were for social media or gaming. We wanted to do something different and build an app that would add genuine value to someone’s life.”
– Holger Seim, CEO of Blinkist

Instead of opening your usual apps, try opening Blinkist. In 15-minutes, you can get powerful ideas from bestselling authors and thought leaders, learn about a topic that has always interested you and get hacks to improve your work and personal life.

Here’s how to make the most of the time spent on your phone.

Remove Distractions

Start by removing the temptation to check apps you’d rather not spend your time on. You don’t have to delete them altogether though. Move social media or gaming apps away from your home screen so they’re not the first thing you see when you unlock your phone. Instead, fill your home screen with the apps you’d rather spend time on.

​​“With consumers living in the age of distraction, they are hungry to invest their time in meaningful habits. Blinkist offers an alternative to mindless scrolling, allowing our community to fill their downtime with something that adds to their life.”
— Carlos Alvarado, Senior Brand Manager at Blinkist

If you’re on iOS, go a step further and add the Blinkist widget to your home screen. This will remind you of your mission to spend your phone time well and suggest titles for you to try. Plus, the widget will take you straight to the book on Blinkist with just one tap.

Turn Off Notifications

It’s not just the apps themselves that are distracting, it’s their notifications. Nobody can resist the “ping” sound of a new message. Turning off these notifications will mean you’ll only go into these apps when you really want to, not when you’re called to.

While you’re turning off bad notifications, why not turn on the good ones? Sign up for Blinkist’s newsletter to get inspiration for topics to learn about and editor’s picks of the most valuable books. This way, you’re never stuck on what to learn next.

A Book Explained in 15 Minutes

Turn pockets of time on your phone into a chance to learn from nonfiction books. Blinkist makes it easy to quickly discover new ideas and insights. The app shares only the most important parts of a book, so you can get all of the information, anecdotes, hacks and inspiration, in just 15 minutes.

Choose from books on everything from leadership to nutrition, history to psychology. The library is always growing, too, as the Blinkist team adds 40 new books every month.

And it’s a leading education app. Apple named Blinkist one of the top 20 apps for lifelong learning. The app has won awards from the UN and Google, and it’s been featured by the likes of Forbes, The Guardian and The New York Times.

But most importantly, it’s loved by 20 million users around the world who maximize their phone time by learning something new.

Make it a Habit

You may find yourself going to certain apps without even thinking about it — it’s simply a bad habit. Want to learn how to make and break habits? The best way is by learning about the science behind why they’re so powerful.

Discover the most useful habit hacks on Blinkist from titles like Atomic Habits, Tiny Habits and Good Habits, Bad Habits — three titles that share exactly how habit-building works and how to implement this in your daily life.

Then apply this knowledge to your phone behavior so you start automatically going to the apps you’d rather spend time on.

Build the habit of learning from a book in your industry during your lunch break each day, instead of scrolling through social media. Or wind down in the evening by discovering new titles about parenting or personal development, instead of unconsciously opening a gaming app.

Another way to build a habit? Add a new behavior to something you already do. You can listen to explainers on Blinkist, turning your commute, work out or time doing chores into productive moments of the day.

“Most productive way of spending time.”
– 5-Star Review

Take Breaks Before You Need Them

Taking breaks is the key to staying productive and feeling rested. One study by productivity app DeskTime even found the magic number to aim for. It found that its top 10% most productive employees took 17-minute breaks for every 52 minutes of work.

If you wait too long to take a break, it’s all too easy to let fatigue guide the way and simply scroll through social media and zone out. So try scheduling breaks so that when that break time comes, you’ll feel rested enough to do something productive with it – like brushing up on skills you need for work or learning something to improve your personal life.

By using Blinkist, you can not only learn new things quickly, you can put this knowledge to good use. When Blinkist surveyed its users, it found that 87.5% often make changes to their lives based on what they learned on the app.

Ready to transform how you use your phone time? Download the Blinkist app to get started.

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