Making my phone less addictive - I moved my email off the home screen

It's crazy how making it even slightly harder to access email on my phone, has caused me to almost never check email on my phone now.

Take a look at the screenshot below, of the front page of my phone.

That conspicuous gap to the left of the calculator, towards the bottom? That's where my Gmail icon used to be. I moved the Gmail icon over a few screens, so that I have to swipe 4 times from my home screen, before I can open it. 

And now, I almost never open email on my phone. This is not because of a personal rule or guideline or anything on my part. I just made it slightly more inconvenient to access email. And now I almost never do. 

What's the lesson for me, here? It is that convenience and inconvenience are incredibly important, in structuring my life the way I want to live it. I don't want to constantly be checking email. It's distracting, and pulls me away from things that I need to be focusing on. There's usually nothing interesting in it anyway. But there's occasionally that little nugget of interesting news, or a message from a friend, etc. That's the variable reward happening - the same thing that casinos use, in order to hook gamblers. 

What's interesting is how weak the reward was, in terms of accessing the email. It just takes 4 extra swipes to get to email! But I don't anymore, not from my phone. I guess the occasional payoff of an email wasn't worth the swipes.