Showing posts with label Distraction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Distraction. Show all posts

Friday, April 16, 2021

Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance Webinar Recording (60 minutes)


On April 27 I joined Mathew Meyers once again to discuss parenting in the digital age.  Mathew and I have held three previous talks over the past four years (recordings linked below). He is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist at Traverse Counseling & Consulting, GBC. I have great respect for Matt and always learn a lot from our conversations about parenting and maintaining a healthy balance with technology. The hour webinar recording is above. This was the advertised description:
 
TikTok, Snapchat, Fortnite, YouTube and more ... Technology is a big part of our kids’ world! Keeping up can be challenging, but a positive and well-informed approach can have a big impact on a child’s future and habits. Learn how to help kids develop a balanced and healthy use of technology from an early age and keep this up through the secondary school years and beyond.

Get tips and ideas for parenting and understand the significant role you play in helping your kids be responsible and safe in today’s high-tech world. Numerous ideas and free resources will be shared, and time for Q & A will be provided. 

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Friday, January 1, 2021

2021: Five Easy New Year's Resolutions to (Re)Gain a Healthy Balance with Technology

Free image from Pixbay

2020 was…a lot! I think it’s generally understood by just about everyone that the past year has been a challenging one. So for this year’s first post, it seems fitting to (re)start with five easy New Year’s Resolutions for 2021 to (re)gain a healthy balance with Technology in your life. The first two are new ones for me and the others are continuations of past resolutions:
  1. Spend less time checking the news. The past year’s political elections and pandemic news among other things has provided for plenty of headlines and stories. I realized I was getting mentally burned out from spending too much time scrolling, scanning, refreshing and re-scanning news headlines throughout the day. I’ve tried a break from news in the past on a vacation, but now I want to limit it in my day to day living. One tip to help: Use Apple Screen Time to limit your own time in on Apple News and other apps.

  2. Have a community discussion around the the Social Dilemma, a great documentary produced by the Center for Humane Technology, similar to the LIKE documentary which we have shown in Minnetonka four times. If you haven't seen it yet, make the time to watch it with your family and discuss it, then get others to join in the conversation.

  3. Start a Facebook/Insta/Twitter/TikTok social media fast or at least reduce your daily time on each--I'm now finishing year five on a social media fast, with only a check of Twitter a couple times per week. Do this to gain another 40+ days of time in 2021.

  4. Take control of your phone by keeping off as many notifications as possible--I've done this for six years and counting. 

  5. Have Device Free Dinners as a family and recording daily gratitudes--I'm now in my fourth year and so glad I started this.
I also resolve to resume more regular blog posts. This is post #275. While I’ve been fortunate to remain healthy, dealing with COVID in the education world has been the biggest challenge we’ve faced in my past 26 years working in education. As evidence to this, my previous six+ years of weekly blog posts dropped to only 14 posts in 2020—and only six of those were since March 2020 when in-person school was shut down by our governor. 

Looking for more tech-related resolutions to help you (re)gain a healthy balance?  Watch My 20 Minute Ed Talk: Screen Time & Student Well-being and read related posts:

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Location: Excelsior, MN 55331, USA

Monday, March 11, 2019

Five Tips to Manage Technology For a More Relaxing (Spring Break) Vacation


It's the time of year when many people take a week off for a spring break. Perhaps to a warmer location, a ski trip to the mountains, or just a staycation. Minnetonka students will be on break at the end of the month. Regardless of what you may do, consider disconnecting and possibly going off the grid completely to make your time off even more relaxing. If you have kids, help them to do so as well. Consider the following:
  1. Decrease or fast completely from social media for the week. Rather than spending time monitoring what others are doing on their vacation or posting about what you are doing, just enjoy your own time. If this is too hard for you (or your kids), try smaller amounts of time away from social media- perhaps limit time to a couple check-ins per day. While you're at it, talk about FOMO.

  2. Take a break from--or at least not continually monitor--work email. Most likely less than 20% of the email you receive needs your attention anyway. Personal email can wait, too, if not a week at least not more than a couple glances/week. Consider breaks from texting and Snapchat, too, perhaps using Do Not Disturb to create free times and help your kids experience this, too.

  3. Turn off notifications and interruptions on your phone. Remember that each buzz or beep distracts you from relaxing and being present with those around you. Turn off the badge app icons displaying missed messages and alerts (the red circle with the white number in the top right corner of each app). These are designed to get your attention and cause you to open the app to see what you're missing--FOMO again.

  4. Don't check the news. Lately on vacations I've eliminated my reading of the news and avoided apps/sites with headlines. Rather than being discouraged by what's happening, I've found it freeing to not be in the know. Try it. Encourage kids to do this, too, whether it is news, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat.

  5. Spend time with friends and family in conversation without technology in use. Set aside time to play games. Show your kids ways to have fun without needing micro entertainment, apps and video games filling their downtime. If you don't normally keep tech away from meal times, a vacation in a new location is a great place to introduce this practice.
Hopefully these tips will help you better enjoy an upcoming vacation or time off. If you can't get completely off the grid, hopefully you can at least decrease the time you spend on it so you can enjoy a vacation more. Of course, you can do all of these at other times, too, such as an evening or a weekend. It's often easier to implement changes in small increments, but getting a vacation away from devices can be a great catalyst for change. Let me know if you try any of these tips or have your own, too.

    Read more about this topic through these related posts: 

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    Monday, February 18, 2019

    Are You Married to Your Phone? More Ideas to Turn Off the Attention Merchants


    A recent video created by Educated Change does a great job of getting us to think about our device use. Watch it above first before reading below:

    (Spoiler alert) As you've seen, the video first gets us thinking we are watching a couple's wedding vows, most likely personally written by one another. Soon, however, we start to question the situation and by the end we realize that the partner in this marriage is actually a device and data plan! Creative videos like this with a surprise do a great job of jarring us into reality to self-reflect on our personal use of technology.

    I’ve written a few times about efforts to get others to realize how much time they are spending on their personal devices (from adding up the hours gained on a social media fast and converting them to vacation time, to Prince EA’s Can We Autocorrect Humanity? to Keeping Tech Away from the Dinner Table and much more.) Getting ourselves and others to look at the amount of time we spend on our phones and other devices is tough. Even harder is getting us to make a change and consider reducing this time. Educated Change offers two hacks which I have not thought of before:
    1. Turn off your device's Raise to Wake setting so you don't feel compelled to look at your screen every time you slightly move your device and it turns on, interrupting your attention and distracting you with any notifications on the screen. Educated Change creatively call this "Turn Off the Attention Merchants." In the past I've written about turning off almost all notifications and taking control of your phone and need to add this to my list.
       
    2. Enact Breaking Bad Mode, their suggested hack which involves turning on Do Not Disturb for most of your contacts. This means that your phone won't buzz or make a noise when new text messages are received. If you've used the Do Not Disturb While Driving Feature, this is similar but is enacted at all times, not just when driving. This is a creative way to use a feature for a new purpose. Educated Change even suggests editing a custom reply to text back, letting people know you are on a "Phone Detox." 
    If you try out either of the hacks above, let me know your success. I'm trying the first but not yet ready to go to "Breaking Bad Mode." 

    I continue to be a big fan of Apple’s Screen Time tools. My family and I use it and I encourage others to do so as well. Using personal data and stats to reflect on one’s own use is the best way to become aware of habits and make changes.

    Read more about this topic through these related posts: 
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    Monday, December 31, 2018

    Easy New Year's Resolution: Add 40 Vacation Days to 2019 by Cutting Back on Social Media

    The average time spent per day on social media in 2018 for most adults is around 40 minutes: Facebook users spent around 41 minutes per day, Snapchat users spend around 35 minutes per day and Instagram around 30 minutes per day. Back in 2016 Facebook reported that the average user spent 50 minutes per day across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Depending on the age of the adult some spend more or less--for example younger adults spend more time on Snapchat and Instagram. (Source) While 30-50 minutes per day may not sound like much, added up over an entire year the numbers get startling when converted to eight hour work days. This seems more reasonable than converting to 24 hour days since (hopefully) no one is on social media 24 hours a day:
    • 30 minutes/day=183 hours/year, or almost 23 eight hour work days (over 4.5 weeks of vacation) 
    • 40 minutes/day=243 hours/year, or over 30 eight hour work days (six weeks of vacation) 
    • 50 minutes/day=304 hours/year, or over 38 eight hour work days (almost eight weeks of vacation) 
    Imagine adding this amount of time to your life in the coming year! Even if you aren't spending this much time per day on social media (perhaps you are on Netflix?) consider these numbers:
    • 5 minutes/day=30 hours/year, or almost 4 eight hour work days
    • 10 minutes/day=61 hours/year, or almost 7.5 eight hour work days
    • 15 minutes/day=91 hours/year, or almost 11.5 eight hour work days
    • 20 minutes/day=122 hours/year, or over 15 eight hour work days (a three-week vacation)
    In October I ended a one year Facebook/Instagram fast. In the past my longest break from Facebook had been about seven months and prior to that three months. Since ending this fast I've barely opened either tool. When I do I'm reminded of why I went cold turkey and stopped looking at it completely: I find it to be a time drain, a nearly endless string of posts that often don't improve my relationship with my friends and family. It seems to me that amount of non-essential posts such as check-ins at restaurants, posts about shopping or some link to a video is exponentially greater than the posts about something I really need to know.

    A    s I wrote before, I really wish there was a way to get the most important updates and highlights from my connections without having to scroll through so much other stuff. Over the past year I've had more and more family and friends who have actually gone as far as deleting their account. I haven't done that...yet. (For more on that, check out this NYTimes article, Breaking up with Facebook is hard to do: Here's how.) But as I pay more attention to the amount of time I spend on social media and entertainment screen time, I've started thinking about what I'm not doing...and what I used to do years ago before these tools existed. It's not just Facebook that I'm monitoring. It's Twitter, Instagram, the Apple News Feed, YouTube, and more. Apple's new Screen Time tool is a great help with this personal monitoring as well as talking with my kids about their use and time allocation. 

     So as I self-reflect and encourage my own family to monitor time on social media, I encourage you to do the same. Set limits and don't fill the extra time you gain with other forms of entertainment technology. As a family we continue to try to spend time together, playing board games, going on walks, sports, crafts, and even scheduling fun time together. Reflect on what you did before social media was part of your daily routine and help your kids, relatives and friends experience and build relationships through these activities, too, maintaining a healthy balance of social media and entertainment technology. 
    Read more about this topic through these related posts: 
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