Smart Phone or Dumb Phone? 13 Productive Things to Do on Your Phone

Introduction

Never has there been a time in existence where we’ve been attached to our telecommunication devices so much, namely our smartphones.

For this reason, they’re almost likened to pocket computers whereby we can interact with the world and can keep up with all the latest trends.

However, most of these pastimes are extremely unproductive, and in most cases, even the services we use deliberately target us to gamify our impulses and responses meaning we’ll do things that we know we shouldn’t be doing e.g. scrolling through videos for inordinate amounts of time without check.

As such, we’ve constructed a list of productive things to do on your phone so you can hopefully start to build some new and better habits — let’s take a look.

Get Smart Now: 13 Productive Things To Do On Your Phone

1. Assess your finances

The modern-day smartphone is packed full of useful apps and perhaps nothing is more useful than being able to access your everyday banking app whereby you can keep up to date with all your incomings and outgoings.

In fact, if you want to stay productive and on top of your budget then we highly recommend getting used to keeping check of your statement each day to make sure you won’t get any nasty surprises.

It’s surprisingly easy to forget about regular bills that come out such as broadband, mobile phone bills, and credit card payments, however, even one-off amounts can be easy to forget, so make sure you set your notifications to turned on and try to log in once a day to make sure you stay ahead of the curve.

2. Set notifications and alerts for jobs

Speaking of staying notified, smartphones are great because they allow us to keep notifications turned on for important things – one of those things being alerts for prospective jobs that are available to apply for in your area.

Plus, even if you have a job, there’s no harm in keeping up to date with the jobs market to keep you in the loop of what’s around and what could ultimately be a better option for you than what you currently have.

It’ll also keep you aware of what the typical pay rates are for similar jobs within your industry meaning it’ll allow you to negotiate for pay rises much easier.

3. Reach out to old friends

There was never a time when you couldn’t make the effort to reach out to friends, however, it’s never been easier or quicker to do this than it is through the use of a modern-day smartphone.

They allow instant and immediate communication and also allow us to scan social media to find people that we might have lost touch with.

Heck, you can even use an old MSN/Live email address that they might still have from years ago to see if you can find them, especially since most services such as Facebook and WhatsApp allow for contact finding through an email address and other such bits of information.

4. Listen to educational/informative podcasts

Smartphones allow us to be productive because they give us the ability to connect with services at near-instantaneous speeds.

One of those examples would be being able to access and listen to podcasts through services such as Spotify and Luminary which contain thousands of different educational podcasts that help enlighten us to the world around us.

They bring us cutting-edge news and also allow us to access more specific information that might otherwise be hard to find.

If you have a bit of spare time to use then we highly recommend doing a bit of digging and trying to delete and clear out any old social media accounts that could be linked to you, especially if they contain sensitive information that can reflect badly on your character as a person.

One of the best examples of why this is important is in the case of prospective employers who may try to look through old social media accounts to find something that makes it easy to dismiss your application or even affect your standing with your current employer.

Even celebrities have been on the wrong end of this where they have effectively been “canceled” for jokes or statuses that were uploaded from their teenage years, sometimes containing insensitive comments about minority groups or where they may have said something lacking empathy.

Hopefully, this should highlight the importance of clearing away information that links to a past that no longer reflects who you are as a person.

6. Improve your emotional wellbeing

Phones are great, mainly because they give us the ability to enhance or augment certain productive activities that would otherwise come off as bland or boring.

One of those examples is meditation or mindfulness where in most cases previously, you would have had to read through tons of books to get an understanding of how to approach this.

Now, though, we can download apps such as Calm or Headspace which can help to improve our emotional wellbeing and can guide us through the full process of how to meditate, or how to practice mindfulness in the best way possible.

Some apps even gamify the process where they’ll offer you achievements for maintaining a daily meditation process meaning it’s easier to stay motivated to do it.

7. Unsubscribe from email lists you don’t need

Another annoying but essential (and productive) activity you can do from your phone is going through your emails to find any senders that you’re no longer interested in and removing them from your subscriptions.

All senders must adhere to the rule of offering an unsubscribe button; most commonly, it will be found at the bottom of the email in very small writing making it hard to find, but should definitely be there not unless it’s a scam or illegitimate email.

In most cases, it can take between fifteen minutes to an hour to get a good clear out of any senders that you no longer want to receive communications from, but it’ll leave you feeling really satisfied afterward and you’ll no longer have so much clutter to sift through in your inbox.

Tiktok, Pinterest, and even Facebook/Meta (still) are incredibly popular platforms for connecting with millions, and potentially billions, of people from all over the world.

For this reason, if you have any form of side hustle or business that is in desperate need of some marketing, then there can be no better way to get eyeballs on it than to advertise or market it through social media.

In fact, there are probably no better examples than this to show you how productive a smartphone can be, especially when used

9. Learn a second (or more) language

Ever heard of Duolingo?

Of course, you have — it’s probably one of the most popular phone apps in the world, mainly because it combines an accessible way to learn secondary languages with a cleverly designed gamified system that keeps you coming back for more.

You can earn achievements and you can even compete with your friends and family where you can try to out-earn and outpace their learning achievements.

It’s really fun and it’s definitely a productive way to spend your time, mainly because it’ll increase your job prospects and can allow you to interact with other cultures more easily.

10. Track your fitness levels and calorie intake

Speaking of productivity, one of the best ways to increase your motivation and understanding of your fitness endeavors is to keep track of it through a fitness app whereby you can keep check of things like calories burned and distance traveled.

More commonly, these kinds of apps are interlinked with their counterpart products such as smartwatches and smart trackers — FitBit is a good example of this.

However, there are also calorie intake tracking apps too such as MyFitnessPal that’ll allow you to input the foods you’re eating and the amounts so you can have an overall amount for the end of the day/end of the week.

This makes it much easier to stay up to date with everything you’re doing to stay in good shape and will also allow you to understand the effectiveness of what you’re doing much better.

11. Make friends and connect with others

Who says being productive isn’t fun?

Not us, that’s for sure, and in fact, building good habits and being productive can ultimately lead to greater satisfaction.

One of the most essential and enjoyable ways of spending your time is by making connections with other people whereby you’ll be able to arrange days out and ultimately meet the right people who celebrate you for who you are.

Having a phone to do this means you now have access to billions of people all over the world who’ll be happy to get to know you on both a friendly and professional level.

Human connections are important because they bring you exposure to a greater number of beneficial situations that can make you happier as a person and will allow you to build a better support network around you for maintaining emotional stability.

Some suggestions include joining Discord groups and Reddit groups for specific topics that you’re interested in and thus, will bring you exposure to like-minded people with who you’re more likely to get along.

More on-the-nose suggestions include using apps like Bumble that have a dedicated friend-finder built into them meaning you’ll be able to meet people in your area.

12. Grow your wealth

One of the greatest things about having a smartphone is that you now have access to stocks, shares, crypto, and investing platforms all days of the week where you can find things you’re interested in and can try to grow your money.

This is probably the riskiest activity (and certainly not financial advice) on this list but it is definitely a smart decision to find ways to grow your money when inflation eats away at your savings, even if it’s not strictly through investing.

13. Study or learn something new

Last but not least, having access to what is essentially likened to a powerful computer in your back pocket is one of the greatest advents of the modern human generation when it comes to accessing information.

Because of this, one of the most productive ways to spend time on your phone is by learning something new.

In fact, it truly is a revelation when you understand the potential you have for learning basically anything you like.

Whether that be coding, engineering, or even how to do the splits, all of this information is readily at your grasp within nanoseconds — don’t squander it!

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