6 Tips for Limiting Your Screentime – Quick Fix Friday

How do we limit our screen time? In episode 68, I talked to Dierdre Wolownick who is passionate about telling people to get off their screens and get outside and enjoy their lives, and I think that is great advice, but it can be challenging. And it’s kind of ironic that today of all days I spent a lot of time scrolling through Facebook for no reason.

Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Whoopsy. Where did the day go?

In today’s episode of Quick Fix Friday, I’m going to give you six tips to help you get off your screen.

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Limiting screen time can be especially challenging for entrepreneurs who run their own business and may need to feel like they’re answering questions or monitoring their emails or watching for client questions, things like that while they are out of the office. I know it’s not always perfect to try and limit your screen time, but let’s get into some tips right now.

Tip number one is to track your time, and that is the first step to knowing where you’re spending the most time, how it’s comparing to other days of the week, and what your trends are so that you can start to figure out how you’re going to limit that and what you’re going to limit. There are tons of app trackers out there that will track things like number of pickups, notifications you get, how many hours you’re spending on what app, and that’s your first step for sure.

Tip number two is to watch your mindless scrolling and start really noticing it. Like I said, I spent a lot of time today, unfortunately, mindlessly scrolling, and what I discovered was it was a way for me to procrastinate in making this video so ironic, right? So mindless scrolling can take up hours of your day and make you so much less productive, and then just compound the fact that you’ve got to maybe catch up in the evening with your work. So one of the ways to watch your mindless scrolling is to be aware of why you’re doing it and really start noticing that.

So catch yourself and dig deeper as to what the reason is. Did you get onto Facebook for a reason? Maybe you were going to look something up, then get in and get out.

Tip number three is make sure that you’re not using screens in bed and possibly even the bedroom completely. I’ve definitely adopted this and I find it to be really, really helpful because then I’m able to get up really quickly. Out of bed. I’m not sitting there in bed just kind of doing things that I don’t need to be doing and I can get started with my day.

Tip number four is to really limit your app access. Maybe it means removing apps from your phone. Maybe it means stopping the notifications and maybe it also means putting your phone in silent mode. Because you’ll notice that when you get a pickup notification that you’ve picked your phone up, it is most likely due to a notification that comes through, either through a text message or one of the social sites or an email. Really limit those notifications and change the way that they behave on your phone so that you are limiting your, instant reaction to those applications. And it may also be something around your desktop computer. If you want to really focus, make sure you don’t have your apps up all the time so that you’re looking at those, or watch which ones are really causing you the most problems, and put some limiters on those on your desktop as well.

Tip number five is something that my son actually does, and he changes the apps on his phone to gray scale. Less exciting that way. There is definitely something that we have about color and, ways that that stimulates us. So by changing those apps to gray scale, you might spend less time there.

And then tip number six is to block time out that is completely phone free. We need time to do some deep thinking and deep work and putting that phone away in a drawer somewhere. Limiting that in some ways so that you can really focus and get that deep work done is going to help your productivity a lot and probably have an ongoing effect on your day.

And then I think a bonus tip is just to make plans to get outside because when you’re outside, you are naturally more in tune with what’s happening in nature and your getting out there and enjoying yourself and not really looking at your phone and scrolling through things that you don’t need to be doing right at that moment.

And if you haven’t had a chance to go back and listen to episode 68 with Deirdre, the oldest woman who climbed El Capitan, I definitely would recommend you do that now or maybe not now. Maybe now you really should get off your phone and get outside.

Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide. Top Tools for late starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.