One easy way to put down your smartphone. I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily.
I know the irony of a podcast telling you to put down your phone, but here's the deal. We all understand that we love our phones, but sometimes they can be a bit much. And if you already know how to manage your phone and put it down and not look at it for a long period of time and not really care, then congrats.
But for the rest of us, it is really tough.
We love our notifications, we love checking social media.
We just want to overall be on our phone.
Look no further than any line anywhere, Like when you're at Starbucks. Just look at every person just kind of looking down at their phone, not really interacting with each other. It's a scene that we see over and over. Recently, we visited the milk in community schools and we talked to a bunch of teenagers on the National Day of Unplugging, which was last week, and a bunch of them told us that they can't get off their phones. In fact,
some of them leave their phones on while they sleep. Yes, notifications going off all night long, but what are they doing on their phones? Snapchat, Instagram, texting, social media, talking to their friends, basically a lot of the same stuff that adults do on their phones. And we talked to
this woman, Kim Annenberg Cavallo. She created a new app called Lil Space, and basically she said that, you know what, I realized that I was on my phone just as much as everyone else out there, and I wanted to figure out what can I do to get people off of their phones. And she came up with this app called Lil Space, And what it does is it's kind of like a timer and it urges you to disconnect.
But your disconnection is tied to a cause.
So maybe the longer that you are off your phone, the more that some business they basically partner with businesses to donate stuff or maybe give you some sort of reward like a dessert at dinner.
Whatever it is.
But really she wanted to find ways to motivate people to get a little space, as she said it, So the app encourages you to put your phone away during dinner, workouts, quality time with your kids, all that good stuff. There's an interesting thing that happens when we put down our phones. According to the counselor at this Whitney Fish, she said there's a constant fear, a constant anxiety of what if something happens and I need my phone?
And for adults, that could be maybe you want to take a picture when I'm on a hike.
You know, I don't necessarily need my phone, but I sometimes want to take a picture. Or if you're out and about, you think, well, what if someone needs to get in touch with me? What if I get an email from work that's really important. All these things that we kind of put in our mind that don't necessarily matter, but sometimes they do. Now that same counselor told us that parents are often telling their kids to disconnect, but there's something that parents don't realize. It's not going to
work if you're constantly on the phone. So you kind of have to be a role model and set your own boundaries. And I see this in my house. You know, I tell my kids I don't want them on their iPad or watching TV.
And what am I on doing? What am I doing?
I'm sneaking away to check my phone every couple of minutes. Bottom line, how do we put down our phones? Well, I thought the creator of this app and Cavallo, had a.
Really good solution. Some really good insight. She said this.
She said, to find some activities that make you forget about your phone in the first place. So if you have something that you're already in interested in and your phone is kind of interrupting that, take those opportunities to start unplugging just.
A little bit every day. And I thought this was brilliant.
It's not something that's totally mind boggling that we've never thought of before. But when you really hear it put like that, you realize, Yeah, let me find those activities that.
Make me forget about my phone.
Maybe I go for a run for forty five minutes, maybe I go for a swim, maybe a.
Hike, whatever it is.
Find those activities where your phone becomes secondary, and then you'll sort of forget about it. In fact, this is how Cavallo came up with the idea for a little space.
She started taking a spin.
Class and realized that she wasn't thinking about her phone during that forty five minute class. I love this advice, but I do find there is one tiny flaw in this whole thing of finding an activity that's bigger than your phone, and that's the camera on our phone. Because what keeps us coming back to our phone. What makes us carry our phone during an activity that's really fun?
We want to take pictures, and I think that's the problem is that our phone and our camera are now linked together and you can't ditch one without ditching the other. So other than wearing a smart watch with cellular, which gets kind of expensive, or taking along a separate camera, which is kind of unrealistic these days, that's the problem I find is that, Yeah, I can go on a hike with my entire family and not really care about my phone, but I want to take pictures during that hike.
And then what do I end up doing.
I end up taking a picture and then I kind of sneak a look at my notifications.
So my bottom line, if.
You want to get off your phone, get into something that's more exciting than what's on screen, that's gonna do it. For this episode, thanks so much for listening. I'm Richdemiro rich on tech dot tv. For links to everything I mentioned here, and don't forget you can now add this daily update to your Alexa flash briefing. So just go into the Alexa app, search Rich on tech and add it in so you can hear this every single day.
I do appreciate you guys listening. I'm rich Demiro. Talk to you real soon.