Luis Congdon So recently, I watched this video. Well, let me back up for a moment because lately, I’ve been thinking about my addiction to my phone and how often I check my phone. I recently read a study that people check their phones up to 200 times a day and on average somewhere around 150. When you think about that or when I do, it’s startling because I started thinking about how much time  I probably spend checking my phone to check on things that don’t really matter or to check on things because I’m hoping that something will happen. Why I am checking my phone so much when I know that if I cut down my social media time to 15, 20, 30 minutes every single day that would be sufficient for me to at least get done what I need to get done; even somebody who operates so much of their business through social media and online. I know that if I spent just a little bit of time on social, I would be done for the day. That could be very productive and sufficient but that’s not what I do. I check my phone a lot and I check in on things and I check my email constantly because I’m hoping that something’s happened or somebody’s responded to something. When I started considering how much time I’m checking and looking, I start to worry about what that’s doing to me. What is that doing to my productivity? What is that doing to my state of peace as Kamala has talked about? What is that doing to my level of efficiency? Even as we are talking I just saw my phone go off and it lit up and both Kamala and I looked over at it as if like we needed to see something.

Luis Congdon I think what our phone is doing is where checking it constantly. What I’m doing is I’m hoping that something has happened. I am waiting for the world outside to give me some feedback and so I’m checking my phone so much because honestly, I’ve feel like I’ve lost touch with my own ability to be the person that makes something happen to be the catalyst for creativity, to be the catalyst for something to happen in my life.

Luis Congdon I’m checking my phone like did all the work that I did. Did it pan out? Is something happening? Did somebody need something? Man, I’m hoping for some sort of surprise, something to cheer me up, and something in the outside world to appease me instead of me being an active participant in what I’m making happen. It’s kind of like going over to a plant that a seed that you set and maybe it’s starting to bud and you’re trying to pull it. I’m going over there and there’s not even a bud. I’m just dinging up the dirt to make sure to see if the seeds are grown at all. I think that’s not healthy for me especially when I start my day that way. That’s something else that Jim talked about in his video that one of the first things that people seem to do is check their phones, their email, and their social media and that trance us in certain ways. It trances want to be reactive to the world because we get an email, we get a message on social media and we have to react to it. We have to respond to it right away. We’re not choosing what we want. This outside world is now impacting us and forcing us to do something and two we’re looking at our phone from social media over to email to the news. First thing in the morning at least what identify is that I’m training myself to have short attention span. I’m training myself to go from email for two to three minutes over to Facebook, over to Twitter, over to LinkedIn, over to the news, over to YouTube and within the first hour and a half of my day, I’ve been completely unfocused. I switched over modes of reading and entertainment and doing when the first hour and a half and I did not actually create anything productive and said I just react and responded to a bunch of things that are happening and a bunch of things that interests other people and it’s like I’ve lost control and then that’s how I set myself up for the day.

Luis Congdon I also want to say that I’ll still continue to use my phone for entertainment to check in on things that are happening but I’m definitely going to run an experiment and one of the things in that experiment that I’m going to try is for the first hour maybe even two hours of my day I’m not going to check my phone for what’s happening in the world. I’d like to set my phone to airplane mode before I go to sleep and when I wake up, instead of checking my phone to see what’s going on the world, I’ll wake up and write or I’ll wake up and go the gym or I’ll write some plans out for the day and I will take that first hour back of my day instead of letting my phone be in control. I’m going to play with that and I’ll check back in with you guys. Hopefully, that works. Another thing that I’d really like to do is minimize how much time I’m spending checking my email and how much time I’m checking social media and I’ll check back with you guys and let you know how that works out as well too. My suggestion is to run your own experiment or at least take some time to consider what we’ve talked about today and what is your phone doing to you. Is it helpful? Is it something that you want to continue with? If so, great! If you have some other kind of response like maybe” I’m checking my phone too much,” or” I’d like to take some of my power back and I resonate with what Kamala and Luis are talking about,” then find your own solutions or use some of the one’s that we kind of suggested around ideas with your phone and until next time we’ll see you on the episode you next week.