Digital Downtime: How Screen Time Is Hijacking Your Focus and What to Do About It

Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education so that you can create your ultimate destiny. Today I have an amazing topic. I tell you what, this is going to be one that's going to hit home for most people. And the topic is digital downtime. I'm sure you know what this is about. Bottom line is if our thoughts create our life, I would question where your thoughts are coming from. And I think you know as well as I do that most of us spend an exorbitant amount of time on our cellular devices and our digital devices recently and in our life, especially over time, right? It's kind of grown quite a bit. But I'm guilty of this just as much as everyone else. So I wanted to share some of my thoughts and a little bit of research that I found and give you a few solutions and strategies on how you can become much more productive, efficient, and strategic with your digital devices. So here's the problem. There's a massive epidemic right now. It's literally attacking our happiness, our fulfillment, our satisfaction levels, and actually even our productivity levels. And that's the use of our cellular devices. I'm a huge fan of having a cell phone to help you take it to the next level in your business. But the bottom line is there is absolutely no question that your digital devices cause less interaction, less peace of mind, more stress, more anxiety, and quite honestly, less effectiveness with a lot of things that you do. Let me give you a few stats on that. I just read a study done, it's a huge study actually done globally, that's identified the top five reasons, I think you're going to associate with this, why digital usage creates stress. Number one, perpetual distractions. The average person in this study unlocked their phone 85 times and uses it five hours a day. And I'm telling you, if you look at your own stats, you're gonna find that it's probably pretty close to that. And this absolutely hurts your attention and your ability to focus. I mean, think about unlocking your phone that many times and think about how often you pick your phone up. Number two, sleep deprivation. We all know that if you take your phone to bed, it's going to delay your sleep. You're going to go to sleep later. It's going to lower, it proven to lower melatonin levels and it makes it a lot harder to sleep right You find yourself having a harder time getting to sleep So sleep deprivation is huge We could talk about that for a whole podcast. We're not going to though. Number three, work-life balance. Think about it. Taking your work home with you or out with you, even if you're at the movies with your family or out on a date or with your kids, you now take your work with you because you have emails and texts and messages And it extends that amount of stress that back in the day that used to have a quite nice balance between leaving work and having personal life. That's a huge issue. Number four, the fourth top reason why digital usage creates stress, fear of missing out. This is a big one. You know, bottom line is your digital device creates social anxiety. The problem is that more of us are connected now, but you also feel more likely to miss out because you're so connected. So it's a real kind of catch-22 scenario, but fear of missing out is a big one, especially with social media. And the last reason, number five, and these are the top five reasons that stress is created with digital usage. Number five is social comparison. This is absolutely the worst. How many times have you found yourself looking at these ideal photos on social media or comparing your life to someone else's life? It makes you question your own life. The fact is we know that perfect photos or perfect posts or the best moments that are being posted are not a way to compare the quality of your life. And yet we do it anyway. Those are the top five reasons. And I think it's a huge, huge thing for people right now with their digital devices. And if you think about it, it probably applies to every single one of those five things applies to your life. So what's the solution? The bottom line, and I'm a big believer that there's a very, very easy solution to this. And it might surprise you because I am absolutely not a believer in taking like a digital cleanse or, you know, removing yourself from social media over an extended period of time because I don't think that makes sense as entrepreneurs. We need to be able to do things with our phone. However, that does not. And also keep in mind, just like diets, you can't just remove it and think you're going to come back and not end up having it take over your life again. I believe that what you should do is you should basically use the strategy of monitoring tracking and reducing your usage over time Become more strategic with what you spending your time on I started switching my time to more productive uses on the screen But the bottom line is, once you start monitoring tracking, you can begin to slowly reduce it over time. Because here's the bottom line. What you focus on, you get results with. And what you're aware of will help you to create results. If you start tracking and monitoring your screen time, that'll help you to do that. So tracking, as you know, will create progress. So let me give you my experience. I, if you have an iPhone like I do, I checked in the settings underneath, there's actually a section called screen time. When I pulled it up, it blew my freaking mind. It blew my mind. Just in the last seven days, it'll give you like a daily average or seven day average, and then it'll categorize it for you. And I didn't even know this existed. But in the last seven days, my average was, believe it or not, five hours daily. And that's not including the fact that I'm on my computer and other things, but it splits it up by messages, notes, podcasts, email, social media, and it tells you what percentage of your time you're spending on that. Now, while I've been tracking that, I've actually shifted my time from whether it's internet browser or social media. I've reduced those times significantly and increased the amount of time I spend on podcasts, learning, messaging. and so just doing that alone is a huge huge benefit to you so I recommend that you look at your screen I think most cell phones do this now I would imagine if you have an iPhone for sure look at the screen time identify what you can do and if you don't have that ability make a journal I mean it's no different than tracking your diet or your meals or your exercise make a journal of what you're doing and how you're doing it the bottom line is to slowly reduce the amount of time you're spending in non-productive areas and increase the time in other areas and overall reduce the time. So one of the suggestions and strategies I have is to do that, track and slowly reduce. Another thing you can do is you can create zones or times that you lower this. I love this comment made by Jay Shetty on a podcast I listened to the other day. There might be certain areas of your home like the bedroom or the kitchen or something where you can eliminate phone usage and you can focus on personal quality time or it might be certain times a day your phone also has settings where you can turn off apps and turn off phone during certain times a day another suggestion get a real alarm clock stop using your phone as alarm clock because all you're going to do is have that next to you you're going to be using it you're going to be looking at it get a real alarm clock and put your phone away at night another thing you can do is find activities that you can use or do without your phone it used to be you know i'd take cruises and i couldn't use my phone now you can use your phone so put it away but find activities that you can't i would get my boys to sit in the hot tub because i know they weren't going to have their phones in there the last thing they'd want to do is drop their phone in the hot tub so that's another activity you could do or just leave it in your car at night and come in the house and just get it when you get in the morning the bottom line is i'd like to challenge you to reduce your screen time overall by a certain amount of time set a goal just whatever it is for yourself i'd like to challenge you to reduce your screen time because I know that your thoughts create your life. And the more you have your thoughts being distracted, defocused, the more you're stressed and have more anxiety, the harder it's going to be for you to create the life you were meant to live. And so I want you to do me a favor and just try to reduce that screen time. And I'd love to hear your feedback on this. Reply back, give me some of your feedback. I wanted to also make a really positive suggestion to you with as much as we look at our phones, if you don't have a picture of your affirmations or your dream or what you want to accomplish as your screensaver, you're crazy. Think about how many times you look at your phone. You should be looking at things that generate the thoughts and ideas that you want to be following. So if you really truly want to change your life, you need to make changes and you need to make significant changes. You say you want to change your life, but you got to be willing to do what's hard. So please do me a favor and just do yourself a favor and start monitoring your screen time, reducing it over time coming up with new suggestions and that i think i hope that's a thought that can help you it's definitely helped me and guess what big bonus as a result you're going to end up being more aware more focused more productive after all that's the goal of living right to be more aware more in the moment and more productive so that's our thought for today as always with the daily mastermind mobile app and podcast my goal is to give you ideas thoughts nuggets to inspire and motivate you, help you to unleash your true potential. So I look forward to talking with you tomorrow. Thanks for joining me today. Have an amazing day.