Episode 99: How To Manage Your Time By Limiting The Number of Hours You Use Social Media Apps Such As Instagram
If you’re the type who easily falls down the rabbit hole that is endlessly scrolling down your social media feeds, then you may need to start controlling how many hours you spend on apps like Instagram just to improve managing your time. In this quick tactic tool, Fiona shares how she only spends 30 minutes on Instagram so that she can have more time to focus on her family and her business.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Fiona’s Love-Hate Relationship with Instagram
Recommendation: Things I Learned from Falling by Claire Nelson
Controlling Instagram Use
Fiona’s Tips
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 99 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
Oh my goodness. Last episode in double digits. I am super excited. Oh, we're only one episode of one hundred episodes. So today it is Tuesday. It's time for a quick tip tool or tactic.
And I thought, what can I do for episode 99? What is something that I talk about quite often? And that really does impact small business owners, but is a tip, tool, or tactic they can implement today.
So let's get stuck into it because this one's a good one. I think it's going to really benefit so many people. I know it's benefited myself as well as many of my clients who have used this. So let's get stuck in. All right, so if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, thank you so much. And if you read my book Passion, Purpose, Profit, or if you've worked with me or seen me speak of basically being around me in any way in the last six years, you will know that I have a love-hate relationship with social media.
I love it. I think it's incredible for, you know, just the awareness that you can get for your business, the connections you can make for inspiration and creativity. And it's a brilliant platform. But I also have seen the detrimental effects of social media. And, of course, there are so many statistics and studies and everything else out there. And my heart goes out to teenagers in particular who are having to deal with that minefield that I am so old I never had to deal with while I was growing up.
So, I wanted to talk about social media today and give you a tip, tool or tactic that will help you reduce the amount of time that you're spending on social media, not doing anything productive at all. And it's not just about being productive, but also the time that you're spending on there that potentially is making you feel not so great when you get off the platform. So this comes from a few different avenues.
One, I talk about this quite a bit and it's something I discuss with clients all the time. I have done an earlier episode on whether or not you need to be on Instagram and you can go and check that out if you're interested after you listen to this. But it also comes from a book that I'm currently reading called Things I Learned from Falling by Claire Nelson, which is a really great non-fiction book, a true story. And my great, great friend [...] gave me this. It's her copy. We often talk about books and share our books. And whilst I was reading it the other night, there was a passage in it that really spoke to me in its where the woman, Claire Nelson, who wrote the book, she has had a fall. She falls in Joshua Tree, does it by herself and she's sort of stranded there. And she goes through this whole process of, “Oh my God, what if I die?” And she thinks about everything she's accomplished in her life and then she thinks about the regrets that she has and she says, you know, I'm just paraphrasing, but she basically says I don't have that many regrets.
But the main regret that I have is the time I have wasted scrolling the Internet, clicking on links, going down rabbit holes that didn't serve any great purpose. Now, again, I'm not bagging out social media all the time. I think it has a fantastic purpose and is a fantastic tool for a lot of small business owners. But I also know that a lot of us get caught scrolling the rabbit hole, you know, scrolling the rabbit hole, scrolling and going down a rabbit hole and kind of wasting a whole lot of time or also just not being present when we're out for dinner, when we're travelling, not looking out the window and just enjoying the peace and the serenity and the stillness.
So that was the second sort of prompt reading this book. And then the third thing is that I am in a mastermind group in the US and we had a retreat recently and one of the women in there who I actually am going to ask to come onto the podcast has actually come off social media altogether and yet is still running a successful business. And I want to look at what she's done and why she's done that. So I guess those three points, the fact I am always talking about this with clients, the book that I'm reading right now, which is called Things I Learnt from Falling, and this woman who I've met recently, who has been off social media for at least a year and still runs a really successful business, though, is all brought me to today, which is drum roll. I feel like it's been a really long intro, but basically it's a tactic for limiting the time that you spend on a tool like Instagram.
So I spend on average about 31 minutes a day on Instagram and that sometimes will go down to fifteen minutes. Sometimes it will go up to like 35. But really the limit that I've put on myself and this is for all of the work stuff I have to do on Instagram, my personal Instagram, anything really to do with Instagram is limited to 30 minutes a day and sometimes that 30 minutes will flash up early in the day and I'll be like, oh my God, what have you been doing, Fiona? Get off Instagram. And then sometimes it'll be sometimes it won't flash up. I'll be less than 30 minutes and sometimes it'll be, you know, right before bed when it's like ten o'clock. And again I'll be like, why am I on Instagram before bed? Get off your phone.
So again, I'm not bagging at Instagram. I think it has great things about it and it's been fantastic for my business as well. But I think we need to set boundaries and like anything else in our business, we can control this. I hear all the time people saying, “oh, I don't have time to finish the course that I bought or I don't have time to read. How do you read so many books, Fiona?” or “I don't have time to do X, Y and Z.” and yet if I take their phone and have a look at their usage, it's like sometimes, you know, two hours and 15 minutes spent on Instagram.
And I'm like, there's a time. That's where it's going. And of course, it's great to be on Instagram, DM’ing, making connections. But if you're literally just scrolling it and you sort of just mindlessly scrolling, there's other things you could be doing that, you know, may be mindless as well, like colouring in or just listening to some great music or just, you know, getting really mindful and doing meditation or just lying in a hammock, all sorts of things.
So if you're listening to this and you're like, yes, that's me, I need to reduce the amount of time I spend on a tool like Instagram, then here are two ways that you can set up an alert for yourself.
So the first is in the Instagram tool itself. So on the app, you are going to you know, you can do this, you can play along at home if you are able to and you're not driving. But if you're on the app, you would click firstly on your profile so that you go to your profile and see your page, your bio. And then at the top, right, there are kind of three little lines like a hamburger menu. It's often called. If you click on those, you'll see a range of things come up from Settings, Archive Insights. You want to click on the fourth one, which says your activity. And if you click on that, you'll see links and you'll also see time. And it's the time that you want to click on. So when you click on time, you'll say an average time that you've been spending on Instagram and some of you, you might be like, oh, I don't really spend that much time. Others, you might be completely shocked.
Then you can go down to it says Manage your time, set a daily reminder. So I have said that for 30 minutes and I can change that up if I wish. That's the first one. You can use the Instagram platform itself to limit the time that you're on there. And of course, like everything else, you also need to know we're not children yet. Once the limit comes up, I know that it's time for me to get off Instagram. Other times, you know, there have been, of course, a couple of times where I've just hit it and kept scrolling or kept looking. But I can honestly say 95 percent of the time when that thing pops up, I will almost say out loud sometimes I do say out loud, depends where I am. “Fiona, get off Instagram and I'll put my phone away.”
So that's the first one. You can go through the Instagram platform itself to set a reminder and you might start at, you know, if you're spending two hours on it a day, you might sit the reminder to an hour and a half, like, don't set it straight to twenty minutes because then you're just going to click off it and keep doing what you're doing. Habits need some time to get used to. But also we can't just go from zero to one hundred overnight, so it might just be gradually clicking that down.
The second way that you can do this. And I do have to put a caveat. I have an iPhone. I don't have an Android, but I'm sure you can Google how to set app limits on an Android. But on an iPhone, you simply go to settings and then you go to screen time, which has a little egg timer next to it. And underneath that you'll have downtime. So I often said that as well. I mean, that's a different subject. But I set my downtime between I think it's set from 10:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. so that I'm not getting notifications and not to be woken up by anything if my phone happens to be in the bedroom quite often we leave the phones in the kitchen to charge overnight anyway.
So you go to settings and then you go to screen time and then you go to app limits and then you add a limit. And so what you can do there is put in, you know, social media apps, whatever apps that you have. So you might have other apps that are kind of addictive to. I've never really got into like games, but I know some people are addicted to Candy Crush and other things. So you could go to social and you can click you can, you know, just tap it all, all social ones. So I'll sort of do a general app limit for all social media. Or if you tap the little arrowhead, you can then decide if it's Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, clubhouse, whatever it is.
So I would click on Instagram and then you go through and again you can set the limits. The good thing about this one, when you do it on your actual phone and not in the Instagram platform itself, is that you can decide to block at the end of the limit. So that means that once you've used that 30 minutes, you actually cannot use that app again until you go into your settings and change it. But the point is hopefully that you're not going to your settings and changing it, that you're doing what you're putting in there. So if you set a limit for 30 minutes and it blocks it, you're like, awesome, I can actually use it after that. And of course, with business, you might decide, oh, no, I need to get into it. But the whole point of today's episode is really to question, do you need to get into it or can things wait until the next day?
And also, are you using the platform or is it using you and that's the thing, you know, these platforms or social media platforms, they use our attention as currency and that's what they're selling. That's why people buy the ads, because they're getting in front of you. If you're not scrolling, you're controlling it rather than controlling you. And again, there's a great film, The Social Dilemma. There's so many other studies out there about how they have been created, these apps to be as addictive as possible and to keep us on the platform. And it's awesome. Like I said before, DM's a fantastic way to nurture connections. Instagram itself reels, videos. There's so much creativity on there. But just make sure that your time on Instagram is being used wisely. And if it's not potentially look at setting a limit like the two options that I've given you today. So that is it for today's Quick Tip Tool or Tactic episode, you'll find a full transcript, including those instructions again if you need them over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast,99. I'll see you in Episode 100 next. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
