🎙️ Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Monday Break(Through). Last week, I had a huge honor of talking to Harbor from that type foundry, and our conversation was so impactful to me. There were so, so many things that I have learned from him. And one of those things was not a direct lesson or a direct thing he does, but actually one of the things that he doesn’t do—and that’s that he doesn’t use his smartphone.
I mean, it’s not really uncommon nowadays. There are actually those kinds of phones where you just have those options to call and text someone when you need it. And I do understand not using a smartphone from a certain point. It definitely has its own positive things. And that’s actually something I was thinking about this week.
I’m kind of a person that gets excited every time I see a new shiny phone released, and I have my own favorite. Maybe even that’s an addiction. But I’m not talking about that part. Today, I actually want to talk about how we are using our time and how we don’t really have control over what we do on our smartphones.
When I was getting ready for this episode yesterday, I was going through my digital wellbeing controls, and I actually noticed a certain pattern. I was around four hours on my phone in total, which is quite a lot of time considering that I’m really not working more than 30 minutes tops on my smartphone. I usually use it for Instagram to publish new posts or sometimes just to reply to comments and keep conversations going with the people who follow and engage with my content.
So using it for four hours every day—not just Instagram, but my phone—is too much looking from this perspective. I was shocked yesterday when I saw it. Four hours. Oh my God. Every two days, that’s one working day of time. And that’s huge.
So today I actually want to go through each day and see how much time I’ve spent on Instagram, Threads, or whatever. Sunday is usually not a workday. Normally I do work, but I don’t engage in social media. I don’t post on social media. But still, I managed to spend two hours and 13 minutes on Instagram. I have no idea how that happened or what I actually did, because I don’t think I had any comments to reply to. I don’t think I had anything really meaningful that I spent my time on.
On Saturday, I actually did spend some time on Instagram for my business—maybe 15 minutes tops—but the total time on Instagram was an hour and 15 minutes. I spent one hour additionally and 30 minutes in Google search. What was I searching for? It’s weird.
On Friday, I’ve spent two and a half hours. That’s kind of worrying. Two and a half hours, and I can 100% be sure that I have not used Instagram for my business more than 30 minutes—so almost two hours of mindless scrolling. That’s really worrying for me because I try to be aware of what I’m doing, where I’m doing it. I try to be aware of the things I do, and spending two hours on Instagram is not something I am looking at nicely.
Thursday is the same. I spent two hours on Instagram. Wednesday, 57 minutes. 52 minutes in Chrome. Tuesday, quite the same. So approximately each day of last week, I’ve spent between two and two and a half hours on Instagram. And let’s say that half an hour was for business purposes—so between an hour and a half and two hours, I have spent my time without actually knowing what I did.
I mean, I do know because there is a certain type of post that I engage with. And as we all know, you can never have too many cat videos. They are all so good. And even though I’m kind of more of a dog person, I would say that those cat videos are the gold of social media. But the thing is, there is a time in your life when you actually don’t want to spend two hours watching cat videos.
I also asked you guys on Instagram yesterday how much time you spend mindlessly scrolling. And the answers were—well, anything between one and three hours. And seriously, most of you are people who have your own successful businesses, have your own branding studios, type foundries. And I was figuring—how do we even get to work?
If I spend weekly—two hours a day, seven days a week—that’s 14 hours. That’s almost two working days on Instagram for nothing. And while I do know that these infinite scrolling websites are actually almost as addictive as real drugs, they are a real addiction nowadays. Many researchers are doing their thing, and many people are actually proving the same thing.
Even if you’re in Europe, you’ll know that the European Commission is doing their work to stop websites from using infinite scroll. When you open Instagram, for example, or TikTok or Threads or Twitter or any other social media—YouTube, whatever—the next video starts playing before you even know it. Doing that, it’s almost as if someone is sprinkling our devices with bits of cocaine.
That is such a good metaphor because we do not see addiction to social media, to the internet, to our phones as a regular addiction. And when we use our phone, we’ll always say, “Oh, that cannot be compared to using drugs or alcohol,” but actually, your brain works in absolutely the same way.
What I’m going to try this week—I’m taking my phone right now—and I’m going to try to limit my time on Instagram to 30 minutes a day. Because I need it for work. There are some conversations I have. So going from two and a half hours to just half an hour, I believe it’s amazing. Let’s see how it goes over the week.
I invite you to do the same. If you are spending too much time on social media, I invite you to limit your time on that app. If you are just using your phone too much for multiple tasks which are not related to your business or whatever, just try to limit the use of it. And we can talk about it. You can message me on Instagram. You can also message me on my email. Send an email. We’ll talk.
I will send a newsletter later where you’ll be able to just hit reply and let me know your thoughts about this.
So yeah, that’s it for today. I’m hoping you are getting something from this. I will talk to you guys next week. Until then, keep the convo going and have an absolutely amazing week.