Getting Back Time

I waste a lot of time at the start and end of the day.

My alarm goes off at 7 each morning and I’m usually in bed sometime between 10:30 and 11: 30 in the evening. And yet, I don’t get out of bed until at least 8 and I don’t fall asleep until sometime after midnight, if not later.

And why, you might ask? Whether you do or not, I’m going to tell you.

I waste a lot of time. And I blame it on social media.

When I awake, I reach for my phone right away. I check the news and social media. I play a game or two, or three. And when I climb into bed, I’m on my phone until midnight, when I verify that the next day’s blog post is live, as expected. Until the next day rolls over, I’m on social media; usually, watching YouTube videos.

In other words, I spend the first hour and the final hours glued to my phone, wasting time.

I’m also on my phone several times during the day: looking at social media, responding to correspondence or commenting on somebody’s posts. And when I spend time at my desk, I continue to check in on social media or watch YouTube, in between doing what I set out to do on my computer.

Lately, there’s not much that I need to do on my computer. Work on The Watcher has stalled. I check the Government of Canada job-search site, I write a blog post or two, or I edit any photos that I’ve recently shot.

The rest of the day seems to be spent wasting time.

I’ve decided that something needs to change, and starting tomorrow (when I return from our bicycling trip), I’m going to implement those changes.

I’ve already uninstalled Gander from my phone. I wasn’t really using it and would only check it out when I had time to kill. Bluesky is my social-media app of choice, and Gander has its limits (the biggest issue is no desktop version).

As for Bluesky, I will be uninstalling it from my phone at the end of today. Going forward, I’ll only access it through my laptop, and only briefly. It might mean that if someone reaches out to me, they may have to wait 24 hours or so for a response, but so be it.

I need to reclaim the time I’ve wasted on my phone.

The same goes for LinkedIn. And YouTube. I’ll only be accessing them through my laptop.

I still have texting, e-mail, and Signal as ways for people to reach me through my phone (oh yeah, they can call me, too) but that’ll be it.

I’m taking back time in the mornings and evenings, but I’ll also be gaining time when I’m away from my computer. And I rarely take my computer out of the house, so if I’m away from home, I’ll be off the social-media grid.

It’s hard to remember, sometimes, what it was like before we had smartphones. But I haven’t completely forgotten the time before these devices controlled our lives.

I’d like to get back to that as much as possible so this will be an experiment.

Wish me luck.