The Johnson Crew!

Hey friends do you find yourself falling into the time suck of your phone you are not alone I'm right here with you and so many other people so let's get rid of that Mom Guild and come up with some real solutions for managing our screen time hi my name is Sarah and thank you so much for visiting my Channel today the purpose of this channel is to empower other homeschool moms to have the confidence the tools and encouragement to homeschool your children and know you're doing a great job

So be sure to like And subscribe and now let's jump into today's topic so I think the first step here is acceptance admitting that we have an addiction that sounds like a terrible word but for real I think pretty much everybody with a smartphone has an addiction to it to some level or degree and quick caveat if you have not seen the social Dilemma on Netflix yet I highly recommend going to watch that that actually is a huge reason why I'm even talking about this topic today why it's been on my mind for the last couple of years

And if you don't have Netflix look on YouTube for the social dilemma documentary and I'm sure you can find different interviews with the guy who made that documentary and still get some good information and insight from those things it was like a game changer like mind-blowing information and totally changed the way that my husband and I look at our phones and social media and screen time and all that stuff so highly recommend watching that anyways obviously you feel to some degree a little unhappy with the amount of screen time you have going on right

Now like you recognize that there's some sort of time suck going on in your life and you're not happy with it that's why you clicked on this video I'm assuming and I've been right there with you many times over so hopefully this video will be helpful to you we're going to talk about some some thoughts and Concepts and then get into some practical tips and how to manage and control our screen time so that you can be a productive stay-at-home mom and a homeschooling mom

So the second thing that we need to do is analyze our screen time if you have never done this before it's probably going to blow your mind and maybe be a little sickening at first I'll warn you but basically on your iPhone I apologize for Android users um because I'm using an iPhone so I don't know exactly all the steps to finding these things on Android but I'm sure it's just a Google search away to be able to find these same settings and things in your phone um

But for all you iPhone users you can follow these steps go into settings on your phone and click on screen time and it will give you a daily average of how much time you've spent looking at your phone or using your phone for the last week and it's pretty uh it's pretty interesting quick caveat because I'm showing you my screen time um I I already feel guilty are you seeing this but I do use my phone a lot for Spotify to listen to music on my phone I also use it for like YouTube videos if I'm you know walking around

And getting different chores done around the house I'll like listen to a YouTube video or a podcast or something um and sometimes listen to a show while I'm like folding clothes or something yeah so anyways those are some of the things I use my phone for that I feel less guilty about time each day of the week you spend on your phone then you can click on see all activity you can see how much time you spent on your phone each day and then it breaks it down into categories for you then you can scroll down

And you can see the different apps and you can see specifically how much time you spent on each of those apps and then if you keep scrolling down you can see the number of pickups how many times you've picked up your phone and looked at it or like touched the screen to like see your notifications um 131 is like out of control I feel like that's so many throughout the day um so I think about this kind of like when you're creating a budget right like a financial budget

And when you analyze all of your spending you look at your credit card bill and you add it up for the month you know some some credit card companies like do the categories for you or you can go and filter by like um let's say Starbucks is your weakness or something so you could um filter by Starbucks and then you can see the total amount that you spent there over the month and like really freak out because it seems like you're only spending a little bit here

And there and once you see that number totaled up at the end of the month you're like oh oh wow like I'm spending way more than I thought and so I feel like that is what this assessment is like is you look at that and go oh okay that's more than I realized it was in a day so when I look at these numbers I look at that and go oh what else could I have been doing with my three hours and 41 minutes rather than being on my phone when you very first go

And look at this just be prepared to be shocked or at least I was shocked I don't know me is we'll see how you do the third thing you need to do is you need to determine your why why do you feel the need to manage your screen time better your phone time better and if you're a homeschooling mom like me then we probably have a lot of the same reasons so I'll share mine with you number one my kids right I don't really want them to remember me as being someone who was always looking at my phone I'd rather them remember me as being present right number two is the amount of time that I could be spending getting other stuff done there's

Nothing more demoralizing than looking at that number and just knowing how much more productive I could have been in a day had I not gotten sucked into my phone right so those are two of my big reasons okay so let's get into some practical tips on how to actually manage our screen time so number four is setting app time limits okay so let's look at how to do that so we're still in screen time which is under settings and now I'm going to click on app limits

Okay so for me I only have two apps that I feel the need to limit myself with and that is Instagram and Facebook social media and that's probably the same for most people social media are those big time sucks like you know we just get in there and we start scrolling and then 20 minutes later you're like what what just happened like I just grabbed my phone to do something else and my brain shut off and I somehow opened up the social media app and I've just been scrolling for 20 mindless myths like how often does that happen it's a terrible time suck I tell you

And so that is a limit that has helped me so much so the way to set that here I'll just delete mine and show you how to set it all right so we're going to click add limit we're going to search for Instagram Okay add and search for Facebook oops and we're gonna add that okay hit next and then you can set a time limit and so this time limit isn't going to be per app it's going to be total so I'm going to set one hour total for those apps together all right

So click add and there it is okay so now when that time limit goes off and I try to click on the Instagram app I get this screen time limit you reached your limit on Instagram and I can hit OK or you can actually hit ignore limit you could give yourself one more minute if you need one more minute you can give yourself 15 more minutes so if you're in the middle of making a post or sharing a story and you need a few more minutes to finish that then you could select that

And then that way it's going to pop this reminder back up in just 15 more minutes like whoop you've reached your time limit and then that's the note to yourself like okay you've had enough time on social media today it's time to get off so setting those time limits on the apps that are big time sucks for you is going to be a huge game changer because now you're getting reminded as soon as you've hit whatever amount of time it is that you decide to set for me I've chosen an hour

But whatever you want that to be for you um because sometimes it goes off like pretty early in the day for me and I'm like how did I already spend an hour on Instagram oh my goodness so it is a very good way to keep yourself accountable the fifth thing you're going to want to do this is just as big as the previous tip is turning off notifications because the biggest temperature is seeing that little red bubble above the app and you're like I gotta check it I gotta make that bubble go away

And I gotta know right and so if that isn't there then then it's okay it's not so tempting to go and check so turning off your notifications is going to be a huge help and also you can turn off the notifications that are coming to your lock screen and alerting you hey somebody just left a comment on your Instagram because if you're in the middle of something you might be tempted to go and check that and then get totally derailed from what you were doing

And now you're in the scroll and you just can't escape so uh turning off those notifications has been a huge help for me now I'm not so tempted to go and check those notifications and I'm not so distracted from the other things that I'm trying to do at the moment so let me show you how to do that all right so you go to settings and you are going to go to Notifications and then you just scroll through the apps and you can just um

So let's scroll down to Facebook now I have mine off um if I turned it on I can choose whether I want it to have a sound or not uh when the notification comes in um but for most of the apps on my phone I turn notifications off because I just don't want to be notified including my personal email we all get so much junk mail and we do not need to be notified every time we get a piece of junk mail it's just another distraction not that we're tempted to go check it necessarily

But it's just another thing like pinging on our phone and pulling our attention toward our phone so turning those things off has been very helpful I just do a lot better not having that distraction in the school room with me because I am tempted to pick it up and check it but if my husband does need me or a family member they can call me and I will hear that ringer from outside of my room so that's fine if you do prefer to be able to check your text messages as they can come in during school time

But you don't want to be tempted to get on any other app you can set up downtime on your phone you just go to settings again and go to screen time to click down time and you can click turn on downtime until tomorrow and then now you'll see that all of my apps are grayed out if I try to click on one of them it says time limit my seventh tip for you is to think of your day and time blocks so like non-phone time

And phone time non-phone time phone time um for me it's kind of helpful if I think of the morning as like our homeschool time and I'm not gonna have my phone on me in the afternoon time like they're gonna have their quiet time so I can have like guilt-free phone time and it's fine um and of course like after they go to bed um not to say that I am not picking up my phone throughout the day and doing stuff on there but I I do try to like not be on it

So much and knowing that I'll be able to have a chance to get on there and check things and look at things that I want to look at so that helps me all right number eight for the first week of checking your screen time do that every day at the end of every day check your screen time and see how you did you know you just want to kind of see what patterns you have how much time you're spending on different apps and that way you can make a game plan for the next day number nine

And last one for you is to notice how much else you're able to get done when you have cut back on your phone time like it's going to be noticeable trust me it could be noticeable when you cut back on your phone time how much else you are able to get done in a day like we can be so much more productive when we are not sucked into our phones for so much of the day it's crazy so do that notice how much more you're getting done because that's going to be the motivation for you to keep being disciplined with this to keep managing your screen time

And that's what we need to be disciplined in this or it's just kind of all going to go out the window right so we've got to have this motivation knowing that there's so many other valuable things we could be getting done or being involved in if we are not spending so much time on our phones and that is going to help us stay disciplined and to actually do this and follow through with these these goals we have in mind now I'm not going to sit here

And tell you what your screen time limits should be that's okay that's I did share that I put a one hour time limit on social media for myself and some days I do hit that remind me in 15 more minutes button sometimes I hit it more than once depending on what I'm trying to do so you know there are days that I am spending more time on there but it is a really nice reminder to say hey it's already been this long are you sure you want to put more time into this app it's like a really great like gut check like oh

Okay yeah that's kind of a lot of time I'm gonna move on and do something more productive with my life so hopefully that hopefully these tips will be helpful to you let me know in the comments below if you have any other tips to share with us I love to hear from y'all and I hope you have an amazing day don't forget to like And subscribe and I'll catch you in the next video Happy schooling thank you