📵 How to make your phone less distracting.

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to optimize my academic life. The most important thing to optimize was my digital life—it's both necessary and distracting. In fact, digital devices have been more distracting than anything else I've faced recently. So, how did I optimize this part of my life?

I started with the basics: uninstalling Facebook, Instagram, X, and other social media apps. In my 2nd year of college (in Bangladesh), I don't need social media for any reason. (For some reason, my college prefers to post notices on Facebook, but I'm ignoring that for now.)

Now the only thing left on my phone is YouTube. Like most phones, mine has YouTube preinstalled—it's one of the hardest apps to remove. If you don't know the right steps, you'll never get rid of it completely. But with the help of Shizuku, it's now "not hard" to uninstall YouTube.

You might ask, "why remove YouTube?" Yes, it's useful. But the YouTube app has become distracting—reels and suggestions are everywhere, making it hard to focus. I have an alternative for YouTube that I'll cover later in this blog.

Here are the steps you need to follow if you want YouTube removed.

1. Install Shizuku from Play Store. It's an app that lets other apps use high-level system functions.
2. Set up Shizuku from the app with Wireless debugging. Your phone doesn't need to be rooted. You can check the setup guide in this video.
3. After Shizuku is set up, install Canta from Play Store.
4. Open Canta and uninstall all the bloatware on your phone. It can remove every single app.

Make sure not to uninstall any app or service you don't know about.

Let's talk about my home screen.

I've tried many home screen layouts and launchers over the past few weeks to find the most distraction-free one. After trying maybe 10-12 launchers, none of them worked for me. So now my home screen is simple: the default launcher with only one app in the dock, or maybe a folder of up to 4 apps that follows these two conditions:

• I use them regularly.
• They help me stay focused and productive.

I also have a habit tracker widget set up with a free app called HabitGrid. It gives you a widget that looks like a GitHub contribution graph—it's fun, relatable, and helps me stay on track.

What if I need YouTube for studying?

In 2026, YouTube has become a vast library of study resources. It helps me simplify and visualize topics that are hard to understand from the textbook alone. So I spent some time and found a way to make YouTube simple and distraction-free.

TLDR: Using Firefox with some extensions.

Most mobile browsers don't support extensions, but Firefox does. So I made Firefox my default browser and use Untrap to make YouTube clean and distraction-free. You can install it on your PC or mobile and tweak the settings to make YouTube the way you want.

Here are some other apps that may help with your productivity.

• How We Feel - Mood tracker
• Perplexity - AI search
• Instapaper - Offline article reading app
• Readest - Book reader
• Tomato - Open source Pomodoro timer
• Open Tune - Open source music player

Final Thoughts

Going minimal and learning to be comfortable with boredom has made me happier, more relaxed, and more intentional with my life. It has also given me more time and focus for studying and the things that actually matter.

I'm still experimenting and trying to optimize different parts of my life. This journey is far from over, and I'll continue sharing what I learn along the way. Hopefully, these experiences will help me connect with more people interested in digital minimalism and creating a more intentional life.