Bored and Brilliant Challenge 3: Delete That App

Hello! Welcome to day three of our Bored and Brilliant challenge! If you're here for the first time, you'll want to catch up on The Case for Boredom, Challenge Number 1: Keep your phone in your pocket, and Challenge Number 2: Photo Free Day. Flurry Analytics defines a “mobile addict” as someone who launches apps more than 60 times a day.  The average consumer launches apps 10 times a day, so to qualify as having an app dependency, you have to be pretty app crazy. And the people most likely to be addicted? According to Flurry, teens, college students (skewing female) and middle-aged parents. Even if you aren’t at 60 times a day, just about everyone has that one app — that one damn app — that steals away too much time.  Your instructions for today: delete it. Delete that app. Think about which app you use too much, one that is the bad kind of phone time. You pick what that means. Delete said time-wasting, bad habit app. Uninstall it. This will be difficult, because app designers are pretty smart. And they are pretty good at building things we want to just keep on using, over and over and over. In this episode, Manoush breaks her cycle. She deletes the seriously addictive game Two Dots. It wasn't easy and it followed a pretty, er, dramatic confrontation with the game designer. It might be cathartic for you.  If you need a little push to take the plunge, Dr. Zach Hambrick, professor of cognitive psychology at Michigan State University, says cell phone games do just about... nothing for your brain. You don't get better at anything but playing the game, he says. And only that game. "If you play Ms. PacMan a lot, you’ll get better at Mr. PacMan, and video games where you have to move through a maze. But you won’t get better at Space Invaders or some real task like filling out your tax forms," Hambrick said. Listen for more. And seriously... delete that app. Today's hashtag is: #NTCDelete.