How to Charge Your Phone Less Frequently & Contribute to Earth Day

Earth week is upon us, which means it’s time to conjure up ways to continually give back to the environment and reevaluate how your business can become a little greener. Decreasing the burden on the Earth’s resources doesn’t have to be done on a monumental scale. There are simple things that can be done daily such as not leaving your computer on during closing hours or using applications such as Box in order to collaborate with members on your team for reducing paper waste. One thing you may not have thought about is decreasing the amount of times you have to charge your phone throughout the day. The less you charge your phone, the smaller the amount of electricity that will be used and the more you’ll increase your phones longevity. Let’s take a look at the best 3 ways to make your battery last you through the length of your business day.

Increase Your Battery Life

Turn Down Your Screen Brightness

Try to keep your smartphone’s brightness 50% and below

Smartphones these days come with big, beautiful displays that allow us view more content than ever before. Gone are the days of 3.7” touch screens. Screens that are 4.0” – 5.0” now rein supreme, with talks of even a 6.3” screen being introduced in the very near future. Unfortunately these increased screen sizes come with a price: the draining your battery. Screens have a double edged sword so I highly recommend you set your brightness at 50% or lower whenever possible. You may miss out on color and clarity but at least you’ll still have plenty of battery to get you through the day. Auto-brightness is also an option; however no one knows exactly how dim of a screen you can tolerate other than you.

Turn off Syncing

Turning off Auto Sync dramatically increases your battery life.

Throughout the day your phone constantly pulls in emails, Facebook and Twitter updates, RSS feeds, news feeds and more. One reason smartphones are so superb in the fast paced world we now reside in is due to their high degree of autonomously accomplishing tasks. This also means that your device is constantly pulling in data, which can take a toll on your little pocket assistant. To combat this you should turn off auto-sync whenever possible and increase the amount of time certain applications fetch information. For example, the Facebook app has a setting that pulls in updates every minute. This means that every minute of every day, that app is sucking up juice. A better alternative is to increase that setting to something more reasonable such as every 30 minutes or every hour.

Turn off Google Now [Android Exclusive]

I cannot stress how incredibly helpful of a tool Google Now is. If you’re unfamiliar with Google Now, think of it as the executive version of Siri. Having a package sent to you? Google Now will automatically tell you when it has shipped along with providing up to date location information. Has your flight changed? Google Now will inform you right away so that you can make that important business meeting on time. The app does that and much more, but sometimes that handy assistant needs to be put to rest due to the fact that it’s constantly searching for information. Open up the settings and flip the switch to the off setting. When your battery still reads 50% remaining after 6 hours, you’ll be thankful.