How to Make Your Phone Less Addictive

Rory Tol

Recording: Yes - available for 6 monthsLanguage: English, DutchDuration: 45 min / 15 minSpeaker rating: 4.5/5 from 532 participants across all their sessions
How to Make Your Phone Less Addictive

Session Summary

“Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep.”That statement captures the reality of today’s attention economy. Our phones and the apps on them are not neutral tools, they are designed to capture as much of our time and focus as possible.

In this session, we explore how short form content, infinite scroll and constant notifications shape attention, behaviour and long term cognitive functioning. Using current research, internal statements from technology companies, and clear visualisations, we build an understanding of what these systems are doing to us and why resisting them through willpower alone rarely works.

Rather than promoting digital detox or extreme measures, this lecture focuses on awareness first and action second. We take a small number of highly actionable steps that make smartphone use meaningfully less addictive.

The goal is to reduce the impact of distraction, regain agency over attention, and make everyday phone use more intentional and less harmful.

Interaction

During the expert session, Rory Tol engages participants through Mentimeter-based polls and interactive questions. Attendees estimate their daily phone usage, guess how much of a lifetime is spent on screens, and compare assumptions with real data.

Polls and quizzes are used to highlight the gap between perceived and actual behaviour, surface the most distracting apps and features, and support decision-making around practical changes participants can apply immediately to reduce distraction.

Key Learnings

Why phones are so hard to put down

Understand how apps and short form feeds are designed to capture attention and why this affects focus and memory.

How to make your phone less addictive

Learn a few simple, practical changes that reduce distractions without giving up your smartphone.

How to regain focus without willpower

See how small environment changes and habit replacement help rebuild attention over time.

Before you book

Questions about How to Make Your Phone Less Addictive

Is this session interactive, or do people just watch?

It is interactive, and the block above says exactly how for this session. Nobody has to speak up who does not want to: the chat and the polls carry most of it, and the questions can come in anonymously.

Is this for beginners or for people who already know the subject?

“Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep.”That statement captures the reality of today’s attention economy. Our phones and the apps on them are not neutral tools, they are designed to capture as much of our time and focus as possible. It is built for a general working audience: no prior knowledge is assumed, and people who already know the subject get the research and the practical side rather than an introduction.

Is Rory the right expert for this?

Rory Tol is one of the experts we auditioned ourselves, and we produce every session so we see how each one lands. Participants rate this session 4.3 out of 5, across 532 responses, and rate Rory personally 4.5 out of 5.

How long does it take, and what do we have to prepare?

It runs 45 min / 15 min: the talk, then live questions. All you do is pick a date. We brief Rory, produce the session, host and moderate it, run the Q&A, and send you the report within an hour of the end.

Who can join, and where does it run?

A team, a department, an employee network or every single employee at once, with no cap and no per-seat price. It runs inside your own Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, or on a branded page we build. No integration, no login, no company device or e-mail.

Can our global colleagues follow it?

The session is delivered in English, Dutch. You can add high accuracy live subtitles in 8, 16 or 24 languages, so everyone follows in their own. That is a paid option, priced by the number of languages you need.

Will our IT department have a problem with this?

No, and that is by design. There is nothing to install, nothing to integrate and no connection to your systems, so there is nothing for IT to validate: we join your own Teams, Zoom or Meet as a guest speaker, or we host a page and your people open a link. No software, no accounts, and no data of yours that we can reach. It is why hundreds of companies, among them some of the largest technology and financial firms in the world, were able to start within a day.

How does this work under GDPR?

We never receive or hold personal data about your employees. Because the session runs in your own environment, attendance and identity stay with you, and what we report back is aggregated: numbers, ratings and survey answers, not people. That is also why IT approval usually takes minutes rather than weeks.

What do we get afterwards?

You keep the recording and can share it internally. You also get attendance over time, participant ratings for the content and the speaker, the survey answers, and the topics your people asked for next.

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