10 Ways to Use Your Phone Less... and to Pray a Bit More

How could an extra 5, 10, or even 20 minutes of prayer change your day? What if you could remove unnecessary distractions and time killers from your smartphone use, keep the genuinely helpful smartphone apps, and redirect that previously distracted time toward prayer and meditative silence? Many crave dedicated time for daily prayer, but life has a way of filling up schedules. Perhaps the most noticeable time filler (and time killer) is the smartphone-a useful always-present device that appears indispensable even when it's not. Pew Research reports that many average between 1-4 hours daily on their smartphones. This brief book offers 10 ideas for reducing digital time killing on a smartphone so that you can create more time for mindful meditation, contemplative silence, or attentive prayer to God. Each idea counters a time-killing smartphone habit with a life-giving prayer habit, serving as a next step or companion guide to the in-depth exploration of digital formation vs. spiritual formation in Ed Cyzewski's book Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction. If you can't find time to pray, you're not alone, and the solution has a lot more to do with cultivating some useful habits than white knuckled willpower. Once you make space for a habit of daily prayer, you'll wonder why your phone was so hard to put down in the first place.