Hey JOLTers!
This time, we’re here with something a little bit different. Before you settle down with a cup of tea and some biscuits, I want you to follow a few steps. Head to the setting app, and into Screen Time. Click to ‘See all app and website activity’. (Are you still with us? You better be.) Here, you’ll be able to see how many hours of your day you’ve spent on your screen, and if you scroll down you can see how many times you’ve reached over and picked up your phone today.
I bet it’s more than you expected, ours certainly was an eye-opener.
If you were to use your phone for just 90 minutes a day, that is still...
547.5 hours
which is 2 weeks, and 2 days out of your year. That is enough time to travel to multiple countries, run a marathon, jump out of a plane and set up your own business.
Are you guilty of your screen dictating your day?
It’s probably become an unconscious habit however, there are many points in our everyday life that we can make small and easy changes to that will make a big difference. The biggest one is your wake up routine, each morning. So many of us have our alarm set on our phone, and as soon as we pick it up to stop the alarm, we feel the need to start scrolling to either stop us from falling back asleep or because we don’t want to miss out on any overnight notifications we got, when in reality, they’re never anything important. (Our co-founder Russell interviewed sleep expert Julie Mallon on this topic, over on Insta in case you missed it!)
How to take control:
Another thing that is in our full control, are those pointless phone pick-ups we find ourselves doing, these are often triggered by a notification, or a sense of feeling like you don’t know what else to do at that moment. By doing this, our phone unknowingly becomes our comfort blanket, and the safety that we reach for when a conversation might go quiet, we get a tad bored or we are in a social setting that we don’t want to be a part of. So how do we chop these habits? We have asked the JOLT HQ what they like to do to stop them reaching for their phones, and here are some of the most common answers.
“Put my phone on DND, even in times when I wish someone would disturb me”
“Hide my phone under a notebook or behind my laptop, when I am trying to focus but begin to procrastinate.”
“Set a time in the day where I can go on my phone, catch up with my social platforms and relax, as that way I don’t get phone FOMO, and the urge to check my phone is so much less.”
We’ve found that now we are in such a digital world, the thing that has been shoved to the kerb, is genuine connection. Why? Because we feel connected virtually to the people on the other end of the screen, and our mind doesn’t feel the need for face-to-face interaction, and the problem with this is that our body does. When we say touch your partner, we don’t mean getting down and dirty, but what we are referring to is genuine touch, whether that’s a hug or a hand touch, it’s doing more than you might think.
So, if you take anything away from this read, let it be the reflection of your phone time, compared to the last time you touched your partner. If you want to hear Russell and Lindsey’s open (and of course inappropriate) answers to these questions, head over to Insta @joltmyworld.
Sending good vibes, and less screen time.
The JOLT Team.