Smartphones Aren’t So Smart — Day 15 of 365 Leadership Blogging

I got up this morning and immediately grabbed my phone. My normal routine is to get up, get ready and spend my time in prayer. I would love to work towards journalling if my four-year-old son would be kind enough to sleep through the night.

One of our principles in life and business is to maximise our time. Believe you me we are on a journey and so having a smartphone is sometimes kind of smart because of the instant access.

On the contrary, it’s a bit of a time zapper. We get stuck into all sorts of reading and research and some of this is not important. There is something about reading that I love but not to the extent it interferes with other areas of my life.

Now, this was something I was thinking about for a while now and today it all came to a halt when Devron woke me up and said: “Vaness, did you know that people follow you, then unfollow you on Instagram?” He then began to show me a way to find out who is really our target audiences. Fair statement, as we bring our business online. But at 6 am in the morning, I was well into testing his theory.

As I mentioned this is meant to be my quiet time with God but instead, I diverted myself into my phone exploring who had unfollowed me and what trends and lessons I could take from Instagram!

So today we are addressing using technology in your business. It doesn’t have to be your lifeline. We need technology to automate and facilitate not to take over.

I still managed to set some quiet time with God and I started to feel overwhelmed by the thought that grabbing my phone at such an early time without even finding out the direction of my day might have been more to reflect on. So I began to sit still and I heard that for some of us technology can be an addiction if consumed more than other areas of our lives. That is ok for some but not for us who know that we aspire to be our best selves so the focus is our end game. This message was key to the rest of the direction of my day.

Not to mention, we have already discovered a few weeks prior to writing that we spend up to 10 hours working per day. The rest is split up between sleeping and family. So attempting to readdress this balance was something that I would need to explore.

I researched the word addictive to give myself some context and it spelt out desiring after things like my phone! Shock horror. I then looked further into time spent on the phone for different age groups, specifically between the ages of 25–34 spent at least 6 hours checking messages, social media and finding pursuits. Now although that was not me, it could be if I did not put a system in place that enables me to be less responsive to my audience and more practical to myself and our business.

What I decided to do is take off all the notifications on my phone so that I don’t keep getting pings. Although I like to respond to messages in a timely way my idea of timely is straight away. So I decided today I am going to make my technology a facilitator to the way I communicate so have staggered times when I respond to my messages. This is something I used to do when I worked part-time and it worked quite well.

And so just to be doubly sure, I don’t slip back I have replaced this time recording 30 Days of Facebook Lives on Finding your Flow 101. Replacing old habits with new ones works well for me.

As a small business owner, have you found the same issues? Am I alone or have you found other ways of ensuring that those distractions waste time and take over your life?

Share your thoughts below.