Deeper Dive - September 13, 2022 - Lessons from a Digital Detox

Giving up gadgets for two weeks create some some important lessons

Over the last couple weeks, our family has been on a digital detox. As we thought about how the last few weeks of summer went by, we were shocked by how much time was wasted with our eyes transfixed on screens; notably phones, tablets and video games. My wife and I knew if we were going to start another year of homeschooling on the right foot, these habits would need to be curtailed and new routines built in.

Needless to say, the last two weeks were terribly difficult on the children. Neither one was a fan of the concept, my oldest son nearly openly cried when we broke the plan to him. Fortunately, my wife made sure the schedule was filled with other activities to ensure that the calendar was filled with activities to keep the boredom at bay.

As we ended the two weeks, we were pleased that the family’s attitudes towards the experiment changed. My youngest daughter was nonplussed by the whole idea; her life when faced with challenges is usually met by a dogged determination to keep on chugging. My oldest son, who hated the idea from the beginning, admitted that the two weeks weren’t as bad as he would have imagined. He was still able to enjoy things (we did let him still make and produce videos for his YouTube channel) and found himself reading more.

And while the two weeks was good, both my wife knew that the challenge was to prevent our family from backing into bad habits. Once we hit day 15, we weren’t going back to day zero. New rules and new ideas would need to be put into place.

This past Sunday was the first day after the great digital detox and my son was ready to get the Virtual Reality headset back on and play with this friends. “Not so fast, buddy,” I said. There were some new rules we were going to follow.

And never in a million years did I think these new rules were going to be so hard to get buy-in.

I explained to my son that if he wanted to spend time on his gadgets, which I didn’t mind, he would need to scheduled them in his planner. This piece of news was met with an incredulous, “What?”

I explained to him that one of the lessons we wanted to instill him was a lesson that would last his entire life, it was the lesson to properly budget his time. “Buddy, we all have 24 hours in our day and if we aren’t careful how we use them, we will end up feeling like we are always under the gun and we will waste more time than we think,” I said.

“Yeah, but why do I have to write it down? I know what I want to do in my head.,” he replied.

“Because your mind plays trick on you. It plays tricks on everyone,” I said. “You may think you are only going to spend twenty minutes on your phone and the next thing you know you spent two hours doing that. It happens to everyone.”

“Buddy, clocks and planners need to be your best friend. If you can learn how to master your time, you will have so many advantages in life. You will find the things you need to do take up less time than you think and you will find you will have more than enough time to do the things you want to do. We need to teach you to stop wasting time because once it’s gone, it’s gone,” trying to emphasize my point.

I was truly shocked how the small effort of planning his day completely paralyzed him. He almost wished that we were still in the digital detox and he didn’t have to make these large decisions on what to do and when to do it.

As we got his planner out and we penciled in things we knew we were going to do as a family; church, going to my mother’s house, going to dinner, my son quickly realized that there wasn’t as much time to do the things he wanted to do.

“Well, you have to make decisions,” I said. “Maybe you can get up earlier if you want to play your VR set.” And he did, the kid who would sleep past 9am ended getting up shortly after 7am to play his VR with one his friends.

I tell this story because if there is one skill I see so many people not do well with, it’s time management. There is way too much time of our collective time wasted on activities that don’t yield any positive results. I talk to many colleagues who feel like their days, and weeks and months get way out of control and sometimes it’s because we let our days rule us, rather than giving us the power to rule our days.

If this is something that you want to talk through or need some help, I am here to help. Shoot me an email at pinnaclestrategiesltd@gmail.com and let’s talk.

Stay Well,

Bill