Good lord…this is actually a little embarrassing and I’m just observing, not participating.
Well, not participating at this particular moment, but honestly, I’m just as bad as everyone else.
Or at least I was, but I’m really working hard not to be.
I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room for my annual physical with at least 15 other people (Baby Boomers and Gen Xers).
Even though there was a variety of ages, races, men, women, singles, and grandparents, there was one common thread among them all.
Every one of them had their face buried in their phones:(.
Millennials catch all the misery from the rest of us about their phone use, but we are just as bad, if not worse.
Yes, these fine folks could have been highly productive answering a very important work email that will make the company millions, but more likely, they were scrolling through Facebook, mindlessly looking at everyone else’s carefully curated life or playing Candy Crush.
And before you think this is just some rant about how in the good ole days people would actually interact with each other, I want you to think about this question.
How much time do you spend on your phone?
(And yes, I get the irony of you possibly being on your phone to read this, but humor me anyway.)
1 hour? 2 hours? All day?
The average American spends 4 hours a day on their phone!
If you are an iPhone user, let’s check your answer.
Go to Settings -> Screen Time -> Tap on the time
And to see how your week has gone tap on “7 Days”
Also how many pickups do you have?
How many times did you receive a notification?
Let’s give that some context.
If you sleep 8 hours a night, that means you are spending 25% of your waking hours staring at your phone.
That’s literally 3 waking months a year with your face 1 foot from a 5-inch screen.
That’s nuts!
Now I know there are a ton of excus…I mean good reasons that you need to be on your phone that amount of time, i.e. work, checking out the grandkids pics, shopping for essentials, staying on top of the news, etc.
But do you get 4 hours worth of goodness out of it?
Most of the really important things take less than an hour.
So how about the advantages it brings you?
It’s entertainment and it’s not hurting anyone, right?
The fact is there a lot of studies that show that more time on your phone increases anxiety and decreases mental focus.
I’ve recently made an effort to decrease my phone time to less than an hour a day and I’m down to about an hour a day.
I suddenly have more time to concentrate on “real” work and feel less anxious about unimportant emergencies.
Could you give up your phone for a day? How about a half-day? Just try one hour.
Yes, this might mean some short term pain for long term gain, but that’s where most of the good things in life come from.
You can always rationalize how you might miss some big event or lose a customer forever, but way more likely, you will get much more gain than you lose from this little experiment.
