Quitting the “Checking Life”

Quick questions, what is the first thing you do in the morning? Or late night before sleeping?

If you are like me and use your phone as your alarm. Chances are the first thing you do (besides snoozing the alarm, hahah) is to check. But what do you check? Is your health? Blood pressure? Glucose? No, you check your whole deck of social media and others services on your phone:

WhatsApp -> Facebook -> Messenger -> Instagram -> Telegram -> Twitter -> Email -> Snapchat -> News (Fill in the website) -> REPEAT (To name a few)

I usually go through some or all of them and when I realize it is already 15 minutes later and I am late to work and haven’t done anything valuable for myself.

But that is just the beginning of what I realize is a more subtle pattern, I check these services constantly and mindlessly throughout my whole day, mostly without noticing. It seems that as soon as I write my phones password my finger goes directly to the apps in an attempt. So what am I trying to do to improve?

Experiments

I am going to do some experiments for the next 30 days in order be more conscious about my phone usage:

1 — Noticing when I reach out to my phone

2 — Say to my say what I want to do when I really need to use my phone. I might use those services, but not “check” them just for the sake of it

3 — Turn off my phone and leave it far away when I need to complete tasks that are hard

What about you? Do you feel the same? What strategies have you used?

Please let me know so I can improve and finally quit the “checking life”! :)