One Habit To Instantly Decrease Your Scrolling | EP97

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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Ms. Bahawk. Welcome to the Have a Chess Podcast. And in today's episode, I'm excited to share this experiment with you that I've been running for probably a little over nine and a half months now. And it all started with just wanting to cut down my scrolling time. I just felt like as soon as I would put down my phone, before you know it, I'm right back to it. Nothing really worked for me overnight. It was a matter of just kind of trying a couple different methods. And so I want to share the two different ones that I think will meet you where you're at. So the first thing that I tried was my notes app. The notes app is only really going to work for you if you actually take notes consistently. But if you are disciplined and you do that, you pay attention to your thoughts and you get some satisfaction out of that, over time you're going to have thousands and thousands of notes. That is basically a never-ending scroll. When it's time to basically scroll, you're replacing it with something else. So you're not completely eliminating it because right now it's probably a little too ingrained or hard to do. The alternative is one, the notes app, but two, the second thing that I found that snuck up on me and worked was ReadWise. So ReadWise is my one of my favorite apps. It is great for readers. If you read on Kindle, it automatically sends your highlights to ReadWise and you can kind of see them all in one place. Sends you emails and you get to review them, all that good stuff. It even stuff you read from articles or YouTube videos, like I read a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos instead of listening to them, or in addition to listening to them, I can read them like articles, make highlights, and then that also gets saved into kind of my master feed. Now, the issue that you probably will run into with using any new app is just remembering to use it in the first place, right? Because I realized, okay, I'm using it, I'm cataloging stuff, but I'm not revisiting it and kind of reviewing my highlights as much as I want. Basically, what I did was I forced myself to see it by putting a widget on the second page of my phone. So the first page, when you kind of like see your home screen, when you swipe the next one, I have a new highlight, it's a longer highlight that refreshes every five minutes, or every time you kind of open and cross it. And so I can't tell you the amount of times that that has pulled me in and made me go, oh my gosh, I totally forgot about that. I save it again, I highlight it again, or you know, it fits into something that I'm trying to do or something that I've been meditating on. And so the entry into being able to get into the app, the widget is a wonderful way to do that because you force yourself to see things you're highlighting every time you just open your phone. And then you're also reminded, oh, right, this is an option. This is an option I might enjoy more. And so that begs the question: how do you begin to read things that you would enjoy enough to revisit the highlights, right? Where that would give you the same kind of dopamine hit, same satisfaction as just consuming whatever is served to you. Now, the second strategy, let's say that you know you're not a big reader, you don't take a lot of notes, and you're like, I don't know, I'm not gonna really do that. Photos are a great place to kind of revisit older memories and kind of again get the same dopamine hit from revisiting older things. You have a lot of photos probably in your phone by default. But again, if that's not for you, the second thing that I would do, and if the first one was for you, I would couple it with this next thing. Cal Newport popularized this concept called landlining, where you basically put your phone at the kitchen counter, put it in a way where it's plugged in and it feels like a wired, you know, landline that you have to use every time you need it. And so it prevents the phone from being near you and it being just an option that's kind of there at all times, right? So I found that this phone stand, this specific one, by the way, because I have a thing on our cabinet, my wife and I, where we basically would drop our phones into that, but that didn't really work. We just didn't use it as much. But the phone stand, for whatever reason, is really nice to look at. I can be scrolling read-wise and things like that, you know, while it's set up anywhere. I'm very sturdy, you can kind of switch it in different directions. You can, it's just constructed very well, and it's something that was like under $15, which to me was just a really like I enjoy not only using it for my phone, but the space beneath what I do is my three by five index cards that I'm writing kind of all day, or my you know, pocket notebook basically is going to go in there and it kind of is just like something that stays there and is a stand that reminds you, okay, my phone is here. If I need it, I can pick it up, right? But the other thing I do is again, I have my pocket notebook there, I have index cards there, I have kind of like you know, a Sharpie and a pen and things that feel, again, for me, more attractive than going for the scroll. And again, that's one of the only ways I found that it becomes to be something that you don't disdain where you're like feeling this FOMO of scrolling. You try to find something that is fun, and it's not gonna feel like that overnight, but as you start to have more fun, you double down on that. So, you know, find those tiny, tiny things that can kind of separate you, create kind of an extra gap between you and reaching for your phone. Because remember, that part is kind of a trigger and it's a subconscious at this point, being able to pick up your phone and getting sucked in. So you have this one strategy of landlining which prevents that or mitigates that a bit in the first place. But then again, when you kind of get into your phone, right, at least you see something that's like reminding you, oh, right, that's something I learned, that's something I want to revisit, that's something I want to scroll instead. And remember, whichever strategy you do here, it is normal for a period of time to be experimentation, for it to work and not work, and give yourself a week to kind of settle into it. But then pay attention to what parts you're enjoying, what parts you want to kind of continue and keep. Also notice what you're not liking because those things, it's your rules, right? It's your process. You can kind of adjust and personalize this system to you as long as it's serving the end function, which is reducing your scrolling. Thanks again for hanging out. And if you enjoyed this video, I think you're going to like this next one.