Reducing Phone Time, Composting & Plant Identification
What does reducing time spent on your phone have to do with composting and learning to identify plants?
Well hello August, you snuck up on me.
After battling with an MS flare for the better part of this year, I shifted some of my resilient and self-reliant challenges to later this year. And even tried doubling them up into some months. Not sure that was the smartest thing for me to do as I wasn’t really successful in my challenges for July.
Here’s how July went…
Resilience Challenge - Reduce Phone Time (2 Hours / Day) Semi Accomplished
Self-Reliant Challenge - Set up a compost area in the backyard and continue to learn to identify plants. Failure
Reduce Phone Time
I just loaded my phone stats for July and it was a mix of results.
w/o July 16 - 23 = 3 h 54 mins (Average) down 5% from the previous week
The big culprits that week were Instagram (8h 8 mins) and Netflix (3h 14 mins)
w/o July 23 - 30 = 3h 31 mins (Average) down 10% from the previous week
The big culprits that week were Instagram (4h 24 mins) and Netflix (2h 35 mins)
So it seems that I’ve been able to reduce time spent on my phone to less than 4 hours but not all the way down to the 2-hour goal.
So here are the things that have helped me become successful so far:
Leave my phone in our bathroom. After I workout in the morning and get ready I leave my phone in our master bathroom until I start my workday. That means my phone isn’t in reach for at least 2 - 2.5 hours every morning.
In the evening, I leave my phone on the kitchen counter so I can look up things while I’m talking to my husband or take pictures of the kids but for the most part I don’t touch it from 5 - 7:30 pm.
I’ve put 15 min time limits on my social media apps. I’ve actually trained myself to only check X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn once a day. However, Instagram is my vice. And because I use the platform to communicate with others I tend to constantly check it for DM messages. I need to just shift the most important conversations to iMessage so I don’t get sucked into the platform.
Truth be told, one of my resilience challenges for August is no TV. On an actual TV or on my phone so I’ve deleted all TV / Movie apps from my phone so that’ll help in August but my time might jump up on Audible. So I’ll have to save those weekly screenshots and then subtract the Audible time out because I’m ok with time spent listening to audiobooks outside of my other phone activities.
Wish me luck in continuing to reduce time spent on these devices that don’t really deserve our precious time.
Composting & Plant Identification
Instead of talking about how I was successful, I think it’s helpful to do a post-mortem on the month and get real with why I wasn’t able to accomplish these two challenges.
I’m co-authoring and publishing a book this year and my focus for July was on editing and organizing my authors. Who knew rounding up bios, headshots, quotes about resilience, finding a copy editor and coordinating sending them chapters would take up so much of my spare time outside of my full-time job? But it’s a passion project that’s going to get published this October and I still have time to set up the compost before the winter so I’m not too worried.
The compost area in my backyard is a bit of a disaster. Truth be told, I’d like it if we ripped out the current setup and started from scratch. And if I’m being really honest, I haven’t had the energy to tackle it myself and am wishing my husband would just do it. However, I haven’t even asked him to help as he ripped down our old shed in our backyard and needs to rebuild it before the winter hits. There are times when I just don’t see myself as physically capable as I actually am so I talk myself out of doing something before I even try it. That’s a bunch of bull crap so I need to just women up and carve out time in the morning or evening while we have semi-long sunlight days and just do it.
There is a book that I wanted to buy for plant identification that a workshop guide showed us during a foraging workshop last year but I forgot to write the name down. I just did some digging in my phone notes app while writing this article up and I think it’s Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I remember the workshop facilitator talking about how it wasn’t a book specifically for foraging but you needed to start with the basics of identifying stems, leaf structure, etc. Popping it in the Amazon cart as we speak.
So here’s to August. 2 Resilience Challenges and 2 Self-Reliant Challenges
No TV
Do Something Weekly That Scares Me
Install A Generator
Learn How To Change A Tire
Scheduling them into my calendar now so they actually get done :)
Got any ideas for me for doing something weekly that scares me? Does travelling with toddlers count!?