Deleting My Mail App From my Phone

I was listening to the latest episode of Cortex, where Grey is helping Myke through the question of how to handle email on his phone. There was a 60 second segment that sent me on a roller coaster ride of emotions. It went something like this:

Myke: “I’m thinking of turning off email notifications on my phone.”

Me: Oh my god — why would you even have them on at all?!

Myke: “…but I’m worried that’s just going to make me check the email app more.”

Me: Oh. That’s exactly what I do.

In-fact, since deleting social media apps off my phone, Spark — my email app of choice — felt like what I opened the most (though the data below tells a different story).

While quick checks can seem innocuous, email is probably the communication that can derail my time the most. Slack isn’t on my phone, and I generally keep all of my work-related communications to email.

So if I absent-mindedly check my email with my kids and I get an email that bothers me (or something I’m excited to tend to), it will continue to eat up my mental energy until I deal with it.

I hate that. So, I’ve decided to delete Spark from my phone. It’s been a few days, and so far so good.

There are a few caveats.

First, I’m keeping the Mail app on my phone for any 2-factor authentication (2FA) or login codes I might need. However, I truly hate using the Mail app, so I expect I won’t be tempted to check mail there.

Plus, you can turn off app suggestions!

I also considered keeping the Gmail app, since Google insists on 2FA by clicking a button in the app, but I’m almost certain this is any of Google’s apps, so I’ve deleted that too.

I’m very keen to see what this does to my Pickups and Screen Time.

Now, when you delete an app, it removed the Screen Time data on the device where you deleted it. But luckily that info is synced with iCloud. So I offer some initial stats from last week — with the note that I deleted the app on Saturday at some point:

I’ll keep you posted to see if Screen Time and Pickups go down!

What’s an app you think YOU should delete from your phone? Let me know in the comments!