There are like some interesting things to do but I don't do any of it. There are so many courses waiting on various online learning platforms which need lot of dedicated effort but I don't get time. There are new things at work that I want to learn, read about and come up with new ideas and stuff, but I don't as I clearly don't have time. Then there is this much forgotten blog here which can certainly do with some attention but again like I said before I don't have time. Where is this time going actually since I don;t work long hours, I don't have a tedious work commute and I don't even watch TV, so where is this time going? No, its not really a question. Everyone around me know and I also know its that damn 'smart'phone. I have it handy all day long and keep scrolling through twitter, engage with lots of friends on whatsapp groups, catch up daily news via news portal apps and then tune into the latest outrage and to be honest it is addictive and really enjoyable. As I have noted in an earlier post, after some reflection this clearly is of no use. I had declared my intentions of curbing the 'screen time' and put in place some rules I would follow. No pointing in going over those as they eventually got ignored. The phone is like 'One Ring' and it exerts tremendous pull over the person bearing it and there is this wide portal or enormous amount of meaningless information waiting out there that is too hard to resist.
Resist we must, reclaim our life we must. So efforts keep getting made but its always hard to resist falling back into old habits. While the phone was smart the owner clearly was not as temptations of spending free afternoons, evenings and weekends browsing meaningless chatter seemed to powerful for the smartphone owner to overcome. Addiction is actually the right word when it comes to smartphone and social media. One thing I realized early on with social media was that engaging passionately with various outrage worthy topics of the day was of no use. Still it was fun to follow even if you don't participate much. That did take some time to remove yourself from following such topics which are really of no major significance. That approach meant questioning what passes of as Daily News. I don't read a newspaper but I did follow certain liberal and progressive news sites via phone app. Even after selecting what appeared to good news sites the quality of most information coming through was not all that great. So I removed all of these news apps and cancelled subscription to Economist magazine which I had been relying on for almost last 8-9 years to help me with forming my worldview. I stopped all of these start of this year and really think have not missed anything. It does give some additional time which you can put to some good use like a morning walk/run. If something significant does happen it turns up on Twitter feed eventually or someone mentions it in Whatsapp groups. So I keep wondering why is there this urge to spend so much time chasing information of current events. I did clean up my twitter feed quite a bit by removing all political discussion and adding some filters to remove out discussions on topics I didn't care much. I do think I learnt a lot from following folks on twitter and by interacting with friends of Whatsapp. There was a lot of things gained, lots of positives but there are lot of negatives. The signal to noise ratio is still very poor if we don't engage with these mediums properly. Lot of time is wasted on meaningless and frivolous things which is something I have been consciously trying to avoid. My daughter usually gets up and runs away after we read a couple of stories and goes and plays on her own. But recently she went away and then came back and told me 'Daddy no phone'. I think that did hit home and I put the phone away.
So this one other thing I started using after that incident was to use the smartness of my smartphone on itself and on the owner. There is a feature called 'screentime' on my iphone which I knew was there but refused to acknowledge until now. Finally last week I started using it and set 1 hour time for the day for all social media. So when an hour overall of using Twitter, instagram, telegram, whatsapp happens on that day, the phone would lock all of those apps. The first week, I did override it because I started hitting the 1 hour limit by mid day. It was also showing overall how much time in a day is spent on these apps. Within a week I learnt to ration the time so that I don't hit limit until evening. Last couple of days, during evenings I'm fully at home without any distractions and so far it seems to be working. Just a week so far but hey I'm even blogging and stuff so that is a big change plus I do find time later in the day to catch up on some book reading as well so 'smartphone' is indeed smart after all.
Update : End of 2nd week, stats show that overall screen-time went down by 11% from usual average, End of 3rd week of implementing this, the screen-time dropped by 27% from the average. So it is working as of now!!!
Resist we must, reclaim our life we must. So efforts keep getting made but its always hard to resist falling back into old habits. While the phone was smart the owner clearly was not as temptations of spending free afternoons, evenings and weekends browsing meaningless chatter seemed to powerful for the smartphone owner to overcome. Addiction is actually the right word when it comes to smartphone and social media. One thing I realized early on with social media was that engaging passionately with various outrage worthy topics of the day was of no use. Still it was fun to follow even if you don't participate much. That did take some time to remove yourself from following such topics which are really of no major significance. That approach meant questioning what passes of as Daily News. I don't read a newspaper but I did follow certain liberal and progressive news sites via phone app. Even after selecting what appeared to good news sites the quality of most information coming through was not all that great. So I removed all of these news apps and cancelled subscription to Economist magazine which I had been relying on for almost last 8-9 years to help me with forming my worldview. I stopped all of these start of this year and really think have not missed anything. It does give some additional time which you can put to some good use like a morning walk/run. If something significant does happen it turns up on Twitter feed eventually or someone mentions it in Whatsapp groups. So I keep wondering why is there this urge to spend so much time chasing information of current events. I did clean up my twitter feed quite a bit by removing all political discussion and adding some filters to remove out discussions on topics I didn't care much. I do think I learnt a lot from following folks on twitter and by interacting with friends of Whatsapp. There was a lot of things gained, lots of positives but there are lot of negatives. The signal to noise ratio is still very poor if we don't engage with these mediums properly. Lot of time is wasted on meaningless and frivolous things which is something I have been consciously trying to avoid. My daughter usually gets up and runs away after we read a couple of stories and goes and plays on her own. But recently she went away and then came back and told me 'Daddy no phone'. I think that did hit home and I put the phone away.
So this one other thing I started using after that incident was to use the smartness of my smartphone on itself and on the owner. There is a feature called 'screentime' on my iphone which I knew was there but refused to acknowledge until now. Finally last week I started using it and set 1 hour time for the day for all social media. So when an hour overall of using Twitter, instagram, telegram, whatsapp happens on that day, the phone would lock all of those apps. The first week, I did override it because I started hitting the 1 hour limit by mid day. It was also showing overall how much time in a day is spent on these apps. Within a week I learnt to ration the time so that I don't hit limit until evening. Last couple of days, during evenings I'm fully at home without any distractions and so far it seems to be working. Just a week so far but hey I'm even blogging and stuff so that is a big change plus I do find time later in the day to catch up on some book reading as well so 'smartphone' is indeed smart after all.
Update : End of 2nd week, stats show that overall screen-time went down by 11% from usual average, End of 3rd week of implementing this, the screen-time dropped by 27% from the average. So it is working as of now!!!
