In this episode, we discuss how to overcome your phone addiction.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how your phone is costing you fortune. The easiest thing to do as a human being is to get distracted and our phones make it so convenient for us to be distracted. The average person looks at their phone 86 times a day. We get those notifications from social media, a sports update, an e-mail from a co-worker, or we just get an itch to play another round of a game that we downloaded. Your phone can be a convenient place for you to focus on somebody else’s agenda if you let it.
If you go on your phone and you look at the usage settings? I would recommend that you look it right now and pause the podcast. I can wait for you to check it out. Did you check it? What were your initial thoughts? Were you thinking there is no way I spend that much time on my phone? If it’s 4 hours a day? Was it for work or were you distracted? If you spend a lot of time on your phone that is distracting you from the big items in your life, what do you want to do now to change it?
I know I get distracted time from time by my phone but I feel like the best way to overcome the distraction of your phone is to keep the phone away during productive time. I wrote the draft of this podcast. I did it at two different times. The first time I had my phone next to me and I just downloaded the Game of Thrones Game on my phone. I’m a sucker for games where you level up because I like growing so much. I still thinking if I want to delete or not but I’m keeping it for now. So I would constantly check my phone for the notification that something was done. A huge distraction. Then I started writing the draft for the podcast episode and I was in the zone. I wrote a the entire thing in about ten minutes and I didn’t really take time to stop. Whatever is happening on your phone, it is probably not that important so if you want to be productive, keep the phone away. It’s not fun to write a paper or work on a project when you have a phone and social media or a game right there to keep you distracted. If you can’t keep the phone away from you, try put do not disturb on and try the palomino technique, where you work for 25 minutes straight and take a five-minute break. The duration doesn’t have to be 25 minutes but what you want to do is have a period of time where you’re not distracted. By checking your phone and going back to your task, you’re still thinking about your phone and are not as productive. In Deep Work by Cal Newport, he says that it can take over 30 minutes to get back in the groove. Just imagine a car that has to go 30 miles and is going at 60 miles per hour on an open road, that car is going to get done with the 30 miles in 30 minutes but in stop and go traffic like in Washington, DC, that 30 miles could take 2 hours. So learning how to focus on your tasks can help you tremendously as you work towards your goals.
The second thing to prevent your phone from costing you a fortune is to plan out your day. I pretty much know what I have to do at all times in my day. There is some leeway in what I do but I have a pretty good routine to keep me on track for what I need to accomplish for the day. I utilize time blocking where in my calendar I put in the section what I am going to do. In the morning I do my reading and writing. That takes me about three hours. Then I have lunch. Then in the afternoon, I do marketing activities like make this podcast, create a video for my Instagram, send out my newsletter. It’s portland playoff basketball now so I watch the game and do my social media stuff while I watch the game. Then I get ready for bed.
I see how my phone could cost me a fortune. It’s is so easy to check something on your phone for work and then you get distracted by something else and then 20 minutes later, you ask yourself, “What did I want to check on my phone again?” To write a chapter in my book it takes about two hours to do so. That is going to be more valuable to me than checking Facebook to see what people are up to. There is a time and a place, it just about balance. The same thing could be said about television, happy hours, and your salaried job. We just need to know what we want out of life and go after it.
I have a bad habit of scrolling on my phone before I go to bed and when I wake up and I get lazy before I start my day. I don’t think that a big problem right now but I can see how it could be. But by looking at your screen, make sure you turn on the blue light filter as soon as it starts to get dark because the blue light messes with your melatonin production and melotonin help us go to sleep. So if you lose an hour of sleep a night because your phone kept you up, your brain’s functionally capacity is decreased by 14%. So the next day you’re going to be a little sluggish versus someone who got their 7-9 hours of sleep. I love my sleep and I strive to get 8 hours of sleep a night. So if I get my 8 hours sleep and am operating at 100%, and goes against someone that is only operating at 86% for a month. I am going to do be able to do 520% more work than that person and that can make a huge difference after a month. After a year that’s over 6200% more work. So if you let your phone keep you up, it could cost you that promotion or next job opportunity because you’re just not ready for it. So make sure you get your sleep and don’t have your phone sabotage you.
To summarize today’s episode, remember that your phone is costing you a fortune if it owns you. To counteract this, keep the phone is a separate room while you work, try the palomino technique, try time blocking so you know what your next move is, and turn on the blue light filter so you don’t lose some sleep.
Thanks for listening today’s episode.
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