How ‘Time Well Spent’ becomes ‘Guaranteed Time Wasted’
The first step of becoming more effective is knowing where your time goes and I totally agree that the recent updates coming with Android P ‘Dashboard’ and iOS 12 ‘Screen Time’ will be great for bringing visibility and truth to where a lot of people could be wasting their time.
My gripe is what comes afterwards, the action you take after you know where the time is wasted. The solution both Google and Apple envision is that the user should set time limits for themselves for the different app categories (ie. mostly social media), which’d automatically lock (one of Apple’s solution and you can just press ‘Ignore’ to continue) or become grayscale (one of Google’s solution). The challenge is that in human mind it works the opposite way, where the limit becomes the goal. In this way both companies are gamifying and legitimizing the time wasted and not really helping to live happier lives online.
I believe that it is not so much about limiting existing habits, but creating new and better ones, which’d ultimately take over. Similarly I don’t believe that any restrictive diet is effective long term unless you add in the new habits that ultimately take over the old habits. If you set min amount of vegetables and fruits to eat/day, you ultimately will eventually have no room, appetite nor time to eat all that junk.
Instead of limiting your time on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, just introduce new habits, like reading a book, listening to an audiobook, taking an online course, building relationships, exercising and set yourself goals for the minimum time spent/day. This way you’re gamifying the good habits and eventually will have no time to waste.
Let’s not set help the platforms legitimize and set goals for wasting time, but focus on building good habits!
PS. Most of that thinking derives from the legendary management book ‘ The Effective Executive’ by Peter Trucker (https://amzn.to/2JlDayu)
