Wham! Wham! The candies and minutes disappear.
The app can be our friend. I love having the weather at my fingertips, for example. If not for a tap on my phone, I might’ve walked out into this 54° morning in a short, burgundy, white-striped dress with white sandals. I looked at my phone and quickly corrected to long turquoise slacks with a black top and warm, blue sweater.
But our apps can also act like a flock of crazed albatrosses chained around our necks, thieving away time. What have you neatly bundled onto your phone screen in quick, impulse downloads? Where do you travel on your phone?
Right now, I am using my phone to blog, a reasonable use of time. I am trapped in a teachers’ lounge waiting for someone to call me to “float.” But I might have chosen to go gaming instead.
I like gaming. I don’t intend to diss gaming. Still, when I first tried my activity tracking app, I was quite surprised how much time went to spelling words, crushing candy, and geometrically rearranging shapes. Wham. Wham. I wielded my lollipop hammer.
Looking at tracker data, I realized I needed to manage my games, mail and Facebook visits more wisely. Since my time was eaten up in little chunks of 5, 10 or 15 minutes, my informal, mental tally of time used for these short tasks seemed smaller than my end of day total showed. Hours. Hours to tiny transitions — except the word transition may not apply to activities when they start start chewing up hours.
Forget click bait. We know we wasted time when we clicked through the article on celebrities who own elephants or zombie dogs in Chicago. But the Macy’s, Birkenstock, Gap etc. sales that keep repeating and forcing their way into brain cells? I don’t give a damn about those insanely skinny jeans that Gap sells to people who are not me. One of my first activities after I studied my tracker data was to unsubscribe to organizations and vendors all over the place.
May I suggest an activity tracking app? I use ATracker. I am sure many options exist. I even paid to go above the free limit of five activities.
I rarely to ATracker now, merely checking in every few months. But I recommend this type of app. We only have so many minutes. It’s useful to know where they go, to get a reminder to unsubscribe.
Today’s coaching advice: Knowing the extent of my tendency to overkill candies and minutes helped me manage time. If you have the phone memory, I suggest downloading an activity tracker. Judy Collins once asked, “Who knows where the time goes?” It’s a good question, and technology can help answer that question.
P.S. Good use of minutes below! You might title this time category, “Having fun!”
