Using Long Ago to track distracting apps

I, as many people, have a love-hate relationship to social media. I love to be able to stay in touch with my friends and discover wonderful things around the world. At the same time thezse apps are engineered to keep us engaged and loose the track of time. It’s easy to fall into the habit of launching Instagram or Reddit or Twitter every time we pick up our phones even if just for a brief glimpse.

Screen Time is awesome to keep tabs on the usage of our apps, but I wanted something a little bit different: I wanted to be more intentional about by social media usage.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop using Instagram or Reddit, but I do want to make sure that if I use them I am making a good use of my time. For me it’s not about not blocking access to them as much as giving me a friendly nudge to recognize how I’m using them.

Long Ago can help with that!

In Long Ago I have an activity called Opened Distracting Apps:

With Shortcuts I have automated this activity to be marked as done whenever I open one of the apps I want to be more intentional about: Instagram, Threads, Reddit…

This is all fine, but that’s essentially what Screen Time already does. However with Long Ago I can go the extra mile.

One of the bad habits I noticed is that I open Instagram, scroll my feed for a bit, get bored and go to a different app only to come back after a few minutes expecting the slot machine to show me something new and exciting. I want to stop that and be more concious of how I’m getting tricked by the algorithms.

The flow in this shortcut should be:

• Whenever I open an app I want to be more intentional about
• Check how long ago and how many time I’ve opened it today by using the Filter Events shortcut filtering by Activity
• If it’s been more than a minute (to avoid false positives when opening the app switcher) and I’ve opened it more than 3 times today:
  • Show a notification to remind me how many times I’ve opened this app and when was the last time I did it
  • Give me the option: Do I want to keep uisng this app or go back to the home screen?
  • If I do, use the Mark Activity as Done shortcut to add a track

Here’s a bit of how it looks like in Shortcuts:

Finally I add this to the automation tab in shortcuts on my iPhone so that it executes immediately whenever I open any of the distracing apps like Instagram or Threads:

I’ve been using this a few days and I’ve noticed that this helps me a lot more than Screen Time to be more concious about how I use these apps! It’s not as much about the time I spend but about the awareness of how I’m using them. Now I get a little nudge every time I open Instagram reminding me that I had just checked this app a few minutes ago and that I’m probably not going to find anything new so probably better to spend time elsewhere.

If this shortcut is useful to you as well you can download it here.

Let me know how are you using Long Ago shortcuts to track your habits!