ADULTING

Your iPhone has a feature to improve productivity that you’ve probably ignored

Parental controls trump willpower (Reuters/Toru Hanai)
Parental controls trump willpower (Reuters/Toru Hanai)
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I’m a 38-year-old dad, and I’m obsessed with my iPhone’s parental controls. No, it’s not because my kids use my phone to view questionable YouTube videos. It’s because I can’t stop myself from reading articles about Donald Trump.

Although I’ve spent years perfecting the art of wresting back control from my iPhone, the 45th president has turned the 24/7 news cycle into a bottomless source of distraction. And while initially, I tried to rely on just my willpower to check out, there’s a lot of evidence that it’s a deplete-able resource. I needed something more forceful, more preventative… like the types of restraints aimed at children.

Here’s how to set it up:

  1. Tap Settings > General > Restrictions
  2. Set your Restrictions Password
  3. Tap Enable Restrictions, then enter a new Restrictions passcode.
  4. Tap Websites under Allowed Content
  5. Tap Limit Adult Content (the irony of considering News as Adult Content is not lost upon me)
  6. Tap Add a Website under Never Allowed
  7. Type the URL of the website you wish to block in the Website field.
  8. Repeat Step 7 until you’ve added all of your news sites. I only kept the New York Times, in the event there was calamity requiring my attention.

Who said adulting was hard?