If you’re like me, there is never enough time in the day. Work, kids, errands, and on, and on, and on. And what suffers the most, your sleep. You go to bed late, you have to be up early, and all night long you toss and turn because you can’t turn your mind off.
What if I told you I had a solution for all of these problems? AND It was going to be very easy to fix. Super simple even. Are you ready…? wait for it…. put down your phone. Seriously…that’s it. Just put down your phone.
I spent last week with some good friends in a beach house and it was interesting to see how we all live in 2019. There were no kids, no work, just adults allowed to be adults. And I quickly discovered I am not the only person with a smart phone addiction.
Now let me be the first to say, there are a lot of positives to smart phones. They are great for navigation, communication, problem solving, and I haven’t had to carry a CD case in decades.
But they are also enablers. As humans we struggle to sit still and simply think, that is unless it’s 2:00AM and you have to be up at 6:00AM. As a result, we bore easy. And the greatest solution to boredom since firecrackers and Game Boys is the smart phone. There are so many things to see!!! You can gamble, look at porn, play a game, stalk your ex, watch cat videos, and don’t let me get started on the memes….ohhhh I love the memes.
And that is the problem. The average person spends 4 hours a day on their device. Think about that, that is more than a full day each week. We will continue to complain we never have enough time in a day to do anything, but literally use a full day each week crushing candy and giving thumbs up to stuff that really doesn’t matter. To really scare you, 4 hours a day is the equivalent to over 60 days a year. YEAH – you spend two months of the year looking at a small screen. If we saw a monkey do this, we would laugh our ass off and call them stupid. Guess what, it’s us! We’re the stupid monkey!
So here is my challenge to all of you. Let’s cut our smart phone usage in half. Let’s start with just two hours a day. Fortunately, the latest Apple update allows me to view my usage time each day and I will begin tracking it today and will report back next week and let you know how it went. This one change will allow me to save 14 hours a week that I can use on all those errands I can’t seem to get to, the walk I’ve been meaning to take, and just maybe I can contemplate why Betty White doesn’t have a national holiday yet at a reasonable time and not at 2:00AM.
