How Engineers from Netflix, Facebook, TikTok and IG steal from you.
It’s a highway robbery.
One of my co-workers, a young technician in our laboratory, is studying for the medical entrance examination.
His problem is that he is tired in the evening after work and can’t concentrate on his studying.
He came to me because he knows I read a lot of books (I know).
I told him, you have to change his habits.
Mine is bad too.
I got to admit, I’m watching Netflix while writing this one. And I need to be laser focus too on the thing that I need to do.
Watch your screen time.
Last year was my best year in terms of revenue. I been doing affiliate marketing for 3 years and that was the year I hit six figures.
What did I do right?
The first thing that I did was lower the distractions from social media. Let’s admit, the engineers from TikTok or IG are so good in figuring out how you stay in their platform.
In short, they figure out how you will be glued to your iPhone for minutes, for hours, for days.
My current screen time is 8 hours a day. That’s because I waste a lot of time a day.
But before, when I was laser focused on my business, I was down to two hours a day.
How did I do that?
Learn how to fight those engineers from IG, Facebook, IG and TikTok.
And I mean you have to CONSTANTLY fight these engineers. The key word is constant. Because every day, you will be tempted by the devils.
Everyday.
The moment you wake up, up to the time you are in your bed, the blue screen light, I promise you, will still be close to your face. Or Netflix is calling you.
How to fight those engineers
My son Koji plays basketball. His coach from his travel team doesn’t own a phone. (Whaaaat?).
His wife, which is my point of contact, told me that Coach Eric doesn’t own a phone and I was only texting his wife.
You can go to that extreme to fight wasting time on your phone by not owning a phone. But I would not recommend.
What I learned is that if you can be more productive by cutting your wasting moments in half (like your screen time), and then put those other half into being productive, it will be massively improve your productivity.
Take for example my life. Today, if I cut 4 hours from my 8 hours of screen time, in a week, I have extra 24 hours a week to do something productive.
Extend that to a month (24 hours x 4 weeks), that will be 96 hours. In a year (~100 hrs x 12 months), you have 1200 hours not wasted.
50 days extra.
Imagine what extra 50 days in a year would be like if you learn something new, like a business. Or use the extra 50 days to work on your business.
Massive.
To help myself (and you), and that technician that asked me how to fight those engineers, I listed the things I been doing.
- Stack a routine — I usually waste my time after I’m done with putting the plates into the washer after dinner. After dinner, I just grab my phone and waste away. Here’s what I do now: after turning on the washer, I will open my laptop to do my business.
- Pomodoro timer — The stacking routine above is my gateway to a new routine (instead of wasting away on my phone, the old habit, I open the laptop to start some work, the new habit). The Pomodoro timer will let me focus on the task for 30 minutes, and then rest for 5 minutes. This was a game changer for me.
- Leave your phone in another room — Honestly, this was a major breakthrough for me in fighting those slick engineers. It’s a simple task, but what I do is before I sleep, I leave my phone in another room (if you use your phone as an alarm clock, find another alarm clock). So when I wake up, I just don’t grab my phone and my phone dictate my first few moments of my waking time.
Now these are just 3 pointers cause I don’t want to overwhelm you. Complexity is the enemy of execution. With this simple 3-steps, let me know how you did. (Hit me up at ebcagmat at gmail).
