Next Level University

#1506 - A Simple Hack To Cutdown Your Phone Screen Time

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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Do you ever feel like losing precious moments to endless scrolling on your phone? In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros discuss strategies to provide a constant, gentle reminder of your usage habits, allowing you to make more conscious decisions about your digital interactions. Understanding our usage patterns and taking control of our digital habits is of paramount importance. It's about finding a healthy balance that allows us to benefit from technology without being enslaved.

Links mentioned:
Next Level Monthly Meetup - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700

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Website 💻  http://www.nextleveluniverse.com   

The best way to track your habits is here! Download the app: Optimal - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/optimal/   

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Any of these communities or resources are FREE to join and consume

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We love connecting with you guys! Reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or via email.

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Kevin: https://www.instagram.com/neverquitkid/
Alan: https://www.instagram.com/alazaros88/

Email 💬
Kevin@nextleveluniverse.com
Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

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Show notes:
[2:02] Personal behavior with screen time
[5:18] Top of mind: more straightforward to focus on
[7:29] Digital Hygiene
[11:51] Janine talks about how valuable Group Coaching is, what her takeaway is, and why she thinks you should take the leap
[18:12] Tracking habits
[22:39] Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Speaker 1:

Next Level Nation. Welcome back to another episode of Next Level University, where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed our latest episode. It was episode number 1,505, one word to stop using in your relationship Today. For episode number 1,506, a simple hack to cut down your phone screen time.

Speaker 1:

I was perusing speaking of phone screen time, I was perusing Instagram. I think it was last weekend, and on the weekend I use my phone drastically less than I do during the week because I'm not really responding to messages. I'm not doing much on my phone. I'm trying to keep my phone away and just reset for the week. But I came across something and I think it was on one of the I don't remember the actual person. It was somebody who's into productivity. That's kind of their brand, that a nutshell is around productivity and it was a carousel of different pictures and the first one said I didn't believe how much time I was spending using my phone. And I remember seeing that and thinking, okay, this is something I want to see what this is all about. And the whole premise of this was one of the reasons we don't understand or we're not, we're not using the necessity of how much time we're spending on our phone, because we don't see it. So there's a setting in your phone I don't know about Android, but I do know about apples where if you go to a settings and I think under settings there's screen time or screen usage or whatever it may be phone time, and it tracks how many minutes you spent on Instagram and how many minutes you spent in Audible and how many times you've picked up your phone and how many times you're picking up your phone per hour. And there's a lot of good analytics in there for us to understand our behavior. But if you don't know where it is, you're probably not going to proactively go search it out.

Speaker 1:

So the thought in this episode that I got inspired by that post was if you go on your home screen and again this is with an Apple, I have the newer phone. I don't know if it works with everything, I'm sure it probably does at this point because they all get updates but if you go to one of your home screens that doesn't have anything on it, so find a home screen that doesn't have a ton of different apps on it widgets, I believe they're called. They're called widgets and click and hold your finger down and there'll be a button that will pop up in the left that will have it'll just be a plus button and you can click that plus button and you can literally add your phone screen time as a shortcut on your home page. So every time you open your phone you have a little bit of necessity not to jump on Instagram or not to jump on TikTok or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1:

So I tried this. I started doing this last week and then I said, all right, I'll wait until I do it for a week. That way at least I can test it out and make sure it's worth doing for the amazing NLU family, and I'm a huge fan. So I'm actually. I'll just show it for the YouTube real quick. I was doing a time lapse on my phone.

Speaker 2:

For the non YouTubers. We're gonna need you to articulate yeah, what you're doing.

Speaker 1:

So I'm. This is my current. Let me see if it'll. There you go. This is my current home screen and you can see this button here or this screen here. It just says three hours and 40 minutes. So if you're listening, you can't see this.

Speaker 1:

But on my main screen I have three things. I have my calendar, I have my calories for the day through an app that I use, and then I also have my phone screen time, and then you can. They're all shortcuts. You can just click on them and it'll go directly to your phone stuff for the day, and then I don't know what's going to show. There we go.

Speaker 1:

It's really hard because it's a white screen and it's very bright in here, but it's almost okay. Think of it this way If, every time you opened up your phone, you saw exactly how much money you had in your bank account, you probably wouldn't spend as much money on unnecessary things. Or if you had a timer on your phone and every single time you opened up your phone, it said you had 45 minutes left this session, or 45 minutes before you had to be at your next place, or whatever it may be, that would probably be super beneficial as well. So the thought is, when something is top of mind, it's just, it's easier to focus on, and that is my thought, simple thought for this episode.

Speaker 2:

One of my clients is a extremely successful corporate lawyer and him and I were on the call and we were talking about how to dial in his time and his life and he's a triathlete as well and he said I think I need to go back to tracking my time in six minute increments. And I misheard him. I thought he meant 60 minute increments. Apparently, lawyers track in six minute increments. I actually didn't know that, and he said the reason why is because your sensory acuity gets really, really honed in, so I'll know exactly where every moment is going. So, yeah, because lawyers bill by the hour and so apparently they track in six minute increments. I don't know the logistics of why that is, but I do know that the more you measure something, the more it improves, and so, whether it's time or whether it's screen time, it's the same principle. You know, looking at that every day is gonna help. It's gonna be super, super probable.

Speaker 1:

Well, and the other thing is, it's like imagine if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, if all of those are the first thing you see, what are the odds? You just click on one, oh yeah hi.

Speaker 2:

Pretty high right so there's no one who doesn't deal with that. Yeah, I would consider myself on the high end of not falling down the rabbit hole, but I go every single day to post my daily habits. I track habits on our app and I post a story post on Instagram and on Facebook and I also post a NLU FitPick slash hashtag team of all moves. It's a fit challenge. I have a fit challenge we're doing. We've been doing it for almost two years now and I often fall down the rabbit hole when I'm doing that. There's one person in particular. His name is Coach Michael Burt, and I just never miss a clip. Every time I see him come through, I have to watch it and then I'll fall down the Michael Burt rabbit hole. I'm reading a book right now by him called Flip the Switch. But anyways, here's my point as someone who works really hard to not fall down the rabbit hole, I still fall down the rabbit hole quite often. It's not something you're alone on.

Speaker 2:

This is an issue that every human on planet earth is dealing with. It's called digital hygiene and it's such a big issue. As a matter of fact, kevin and I, before this episode, we have been master mining essentially since 11 am. We're coming up on our seventh year in business, the birthday of NLU. It was Hyper Conscious Podcast back then, but the birthday of NLU, we have confirmed it.

Speaker 2:

We went back into the archives of Kevin's Facebook of his very first post of the Hyper Conscious Podcast when it was born and it was March 31st of 2017. So if you do 2017 to 2018, 2018 to 2019, it's 2024 will be our seventh year in business, essentially. And so, anyways, we're seven years old now. Awesome, awesome, awesome. But we're still dealing with this issue. Everyone deals with this issue. We're trying to button up and so we've been master mining all day today and we actually went back through the archives of our episodes and we looked at listens because we wanted to see, okay, what episodes are winning, what episodes are landing, what episodes are valuable, and there's one that is what five times the normal listens, or eight, seven, or eight, eight times the listens.

Speaker 2:

What was the title? The social media one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was about. I don't remember. I think it was about the episode we did on unfollowing people that aren't necessarily in alignment with who you desire to be. I don't remember the exact title, but it was something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, maybe we ended up on one of the search functions. Maybe there's another anomaly in here, but it would make sense, cause I told Kev this. I said I know for a fact that that's an issue a lot of people have. A lot of us are following a lot of people that really don't align with us anymore because it's such a pain. It's kind of like if you don't keep up with cleaning out your closet, eventually it ends up this giant heap. Or we all deal with the laundry issue. If you just let the laundry pile up, eventually it's like this mountain. We used to call it laundry mountain as a joke. Fortunately we have a housekeeper now, which we're so grateful for shout out to Cleoji. But laundry mountain piles up. Same with your digital hygiene. If you're not unfollowing people consistently, eventually it just piles up and it becomes this mountain that you never wanna climb. And so I've been unfollowing pretty consistently since that episode that we did.

Speaker 2:

But the last thing that I wanna share here before I let Kevin talk again Kev remember when I calculated this, so all of our listeners know I'm big into numbers, math guy, and I calculated if you go on Facebook five times a day for five minutes, that comes to 25 minutes per day. So five times five, 25. Now if you take that over a year, you take 25 minutes and you multiply it by 365 days, that comes to a certain number of hours. I crunched the numbers once. It actually comes to almost 10 full 16 hour days gone. And so this is the analogy that I've used many times on this podcast and I think it's so powerful because we don't realize that this is happening and this is happening to all of us. I go on Facebook five times a day, for five minutes for sure. Same for sure. So that means that at the end of the year I'm accumulating 10 full 16 hour days, assuming you're sleeping eight, 10 full 16 hour days. And I can actually have you do the math. You can do five times five, 25, 25 minutes times 365 days, divide that by 60, because that gives you the number of hours, and then divide that by 16 for 16 hour days it comes to 9.5, something. So I rounded up to 10 days.

Speaker 2:

But the point is, if you had a friend who was scrolling for 10 full 16 hour days straight without doing anything else not eating, not going to the bathroom, not sleeping you would think they were insane. But yet we're all doing that every year. We just don't do it all at once, and I think that that's important. So there's the necessity. It's really really, really important to realize that a lot of these apps didn't exist 15 years ago, five years ago. Tiktok didn't exist five years ago, I don't think I mean if it did, it was small, definitely yeah. So a lot of these apps and stuff, they're new and we have got to take our consciousness back, take our attention back, take our focus back. So work really hard to limit your screen time, for sure, and if you are going to use a screen, I hope it's for NLU.

Speaker 1:

You and I, we spend a lot of time in front of screens, whether it's the laptop, whether it's the TV, because usually we're casting to the TV and that's where the cameras go. But I'm curious to that. I wonder how many hours a day I spend on my laptop. That would be a really good number to have, and you've heard us say this so many times. If you feel like maybe you're struggling with money, tracking your finances is going to be helpful. If you feel like you're struggling with your sleep, tracking your sleep is probably going to be helpful.

Speaker 1:

If you feel like you're getting lost in the sauce, as we say, and you're losing what feels like hours and hours and hours of your day and you regret it, tracking that and having that top of mind it's just going to create a little bit of necessity, a little bit of extra necessity and maybe a little bit of extra pain through feedback. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're getting to the end of the day and you're regretting how you spent your day, that's probably a good thing to have, and maybe that maybe you're going to get the pain in advance. So we've said this a million times you're going to get feedback. You can either get it along the way or you get it all at once at the end.

Speaker 1:

So it's either when I pick up my phone. So, as of today, I have three hours and 40 minutes, three hours and 49 minutes of screen time. One hour and 27 minutes is on Instagram, 28 minutes is on Facebook. Seven minutes is on WhatsApp. Five minutes is on my camera I was doing a video of this before. Four minutes on my messages, one minute on Gmail.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I got you today. The Graham got me today. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of food videos because I'm dieting, so I just I like food videos. But I picked up my phone 34 times today, which, all things considered, isn't I don't know, maybe isn't terrible. But if you look at that, if you said to me, hey, kev, can you jump on a call today? And I said, oh, I just don't have time. I just showed you that I have three hours and 49 minutes of time. Now, disclaimer, a lot of that is me doing stuff for business. It's replying to people, whatever it may be.

Speaker 2:

So maybe that's another layer. You use Instagram to connect with listeners and with business owners and clients.

Speaker 1:

But maybe that's. Another layer is maybe you get to the end of the day. So we always try to do both sides. Maybe you get to the end of the day and you say, oh my goodness, I can't believe. I spent three hours on my phone and then you go and look and then two hours and 15 minutes was on Audible, and then maybe 30 minutes was on Waze because you went somewhere, and then maybe 15 minutes was on social media. That's not necessarily a bad place to be, so it'll give you both ends of the spectrum that way, it's not just one end One last quick thing, so I want to share this.

Speaker 2:

We've all heard the analogy the slippery slope but I have something that happened to me recently that I've shared on the podcast before. That, I think, is the perfect example of a slippery slope. So it's actually Kevin just told me today this is the first I had found out about it that Chandler from Friends had passed away. Actually, this is kind of part of what made me think of this. So, RIP to Chandler. What's his?

Speaker 1:

real name again. I'm sorry. Oh, my goodness, I'm not the one for that. I will find it Matthew Perry, matthew Perry, matthew Perry.

Speaker 2:

So, anyways, emilia, two weeks ago three weeks ago I think three weeks ago went to South Carolina. Her family got a new home down there and when she was away I started watching. I watched the Friends reunion because that was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I mean basically a teenager I was a little late to the game and loved shows, loved Friends, watched it in college, rewatched it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah A lot of big Friends fans out there. And after I watched the reunion I was like, okay, we're going back, baby, we're going back.

Speaker 2:

You know it's not a big deal. Perfect R&R, 24-minute episodes, one episode a day no big deal. No big deal. First night couple episodes. Second night Five episodes. Third night Too many episodes. I'm up at 1 am. You know I'm eating snacks at night. I shouldn't be eating and they just roll into each other. It's like one giant movie. It's unbelievable and it's also hilarious. I think so. Here's my point. Whether it's Instagram or it's tick-tock or it's friends, or it's your favorite video game, I am telling you right now you are not the only person. You hear people say I have an addictive personality. Here's the neuroscience all humans have addictive personalities, all humans, I mean. You get Burger King once and you want to get it again. You get Taco Bell once you want to get it unless you don't like you.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of unless you don't like it. Yeah, I hear a lot of disrespect when it comes to Taco Bell and I am quite frankly, offended by it.

Speaker 2:

Of course, obviously, even in L? U we have binge listeners. They listen to L? U. They're like hey, can you please not do 10-minute episodes? I need more time with NLU.

Speaker 2:

All humans have an addictive personality. Now there are. It's a spectrum. Some people are more eccentric than others. For lack of better phrasing, I'm definitely on the high end of addictive personality, so I have to be very careful about what I do.

Speaker 2:

I told Kevin, if I start playing a video game and we're gonna have my video game stats going up and NLU stats going down, being playful. But here's my point you are not alone in this. No matter what, no matter who you are, no matter who I coach, I'm telling you, everyone has their own little mini addictions and you gotta stay the the person in control. You got to make sure that you stay on top of it, and one of the best ways to do that is just to measure it. If you're gonna get addicted to something, you might as well get addicted to tracking habits. If you're gonna get addicted to something, you might as well get addicted to great books. I? I try really hard to stay focused on things that are constructive, because I know how my addictive personality works, and so if you're falling down the rabbit hole and you're on your phone for Four hours a day, blah, blah, blah, you are so unbelievably not alone and we want to help and it's gonna be more fulfilling.

Speaker 1:

It is a more fulfilling life when you are present and when you're on social media, you're most likely not present, even if you're, even if you're following or you're watching cat videos or food videos, like I am when I'm dieting. Again, there's probably better, more constructive, fulfilling uses of your time. This would be my next level nugget. If there's any part of you that is scared to do this because you're afraid of the number, it's probably a good time to do it. Just like if you're afraid to look at your bank account because you don't know where the number is, now is the time to do it, because it most likely is gonna go downhill from here, not uphill. So that would be my next level nugget. Sir, what is your next level nugget? Did you say one? I don't think you did.

Speaker 2:

I didn't, mine would be. You are so not alone in this. This is an issue that older generations did not have to deal with and for our older listeners, I did this poll in book club once and I said for the older people in the room and I didn't mean to offend anybody Do you remember what it was like pre-internet? And they're like, yep, I said it was, it was a simpler time, and they were all nodding their heads. You know they were like I'm telling you it wasn't like this, it was better. All of them think it was better now.

Speaker 2:

I also said, by the way, if it wasn't for the internet, I wouldn't know any of you. So I'm grateful for the internet, but it comes with a downside. This is the downside. My next level nugget, is hack back, get back your mind, take back your mind.

Speaker 1:

Next level nation, we have our 23rd Next level monthly meetup. So 23 months in a row, we're coming up on two years strong. It is Thursday, november 2nd. So if you were listening to this, it is, I believe it is Halloween. I don't know if Halloween is celebrated everywhere, but in the US this is Halloween, so it's October 31st, if you're listening.

Speaker 1:

So this Thursday, from 6 to 7 Eastern, we have our meetup, and it is how to communicate a vulnerable truth. This is one of the most challenging things for all of us. Alan and I are very blessed where we have a Wonderful team that helps us and works with us on this amazing mission. Oftentimes we have to exchange vulnerable truths. Alan and I, we've been together for six hours and today we Exchanged many vulnerable truths because we're trying to figure out what's best for the business and all that stuff. So that is what we would be focused on during that meetup. You do not have to participate. You can participate if you like. You can have your camera on, you can have your camera off. Whatever is gonna be best for you works for us. It is not recorded. It is completely private. It is a safe place to come explore NLU at a little bit of a deeper level. The link for the landing page will be in the show.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So you've heard a lot about next-level nation. If you're an old listener or a long-term listener, I should say if you're a new listener, you have not. What I want to shout out about next-level nation is how much Self-awareness you're gonna gain just from so.

Speaker 2:

Shout out to Amy on the team. She always posts these incredible, compelling questions that get you thinking about yourself in a new way. So one of them from this week is what are your top three favorite qualities about yourself? So next-level nation is a place where you are safe to celebrate your strengths and your weaknesses. It's a place where you are safe to celebrate your successes and to talk about your struggles.

Speaker 2:

And so kevs my ability to make people laugh, my empathy, my reliability the other ones I'll keep anonymous, of course my grit, my self-belief, my ever-growing ability to say no, my reliability, my creativity, my organization, my intelligence, my work ethic, my desire to help others maximize their own unique potential, my ability to facilitate an incredible experience, my humility, my love for collaboration. So it's really cool because when you're in next-level nation, if you participate, it's gonna help you understand yourself at a far deeper level. Just from answering these questions, it's been. It's been quite eye-opening. So I really appreciate you aim. Thank you so much for all that you do in there and we're in there as well. We're engaging in there every single day. The whole team is, so we hope you to see you in there.

Speaker 1:

The link will be in the show notes as with most things NLU, we want it to be consistent. Consistent value is always the goal, and shout out to the amazing team and Amy for doing a wonderful job at that. Tomorrow for episode number 1,507 how to turn your limiting beliefs into empowering ones. As you know and I've said this many times on this podcast I Was riddled with limiting beliefs in the very beginning and throughout I have worked Diligently to overcome them, but I'm sure I still have my fair share that pop up. So we are gonna talk about that tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU we do not have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Speaker 2:

Keep that digital hygiene high, next up on nation I.

People on this episode

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Alan Lazaros

Host
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Kevin Palmieri

Host