I was coaching a Senior Leader last week and the issue of burnout came up. I gave her an exercise to explore the sources of stress and anxiety for her, by going through a typical week and journaling where she spent her time. I also asked her to share her weekly screen time breakdown usage with me which proved to be the most revealing.
Her total daily screen time was 5 Hours 51 minutes per day!
Her Weekly Screen time highs were
- Instagram 5 hrs 41 mins
- Whats app 4 hrs 32 mins
- Facebook 4 hrs 9 mins
- Spotify 3 hrs 18 mins
- Podcasts 2 hrs 24 mins
Her daily pick ups to look at her phone were 77 with most pick ups on Wednesday topping out at 95 to bring her a total weekly pick up number of 503!
My coaching client is not alone, take a look at your own screen time to see how you compare. My view is we are not reflecting on what this attention economy is doing to our lives.
The US Average is that we spend 5.4 hours a day on our phones each day, 2.24 hours on social media! We check our phones 63 times a day and we are exposed to almost 5,000 advertising messages a day online. We need to wake up and see we are being programmed to react to what others want from us. Advertisers want us to feel needy and unfulfilled so they can promote their products and services through influencers. The perfect body, vacation, house, lifestyle, job! The pressure to be perfect is coming from the outside in.
In my book ‘Future Your Career’, I spoke about determining what you want ‘from the inside out’. We are now living through a massive change in how we work and we need to start making intentional choices based on what we want in our future. We only get what someone else wants of us from our i-phone. We will get what we want when we create space in our lives to visualise and mentally rehearse what we want. This is what Hi- Performing Sport’s athletes do, so why not learn from them. This week choose to be intentional in your choices and not just reacting to what others want from you.
Stand for something – as the saying goes “be yourself everyone else is taken!”
#leadership #futureofwork #timemanagement
