I’ve lost 6 hours watching 3 movies on Prime, so I started a Cold War against these companies stealing my time.

So I planned for this not to happen again. Here’s how I dissected each of my enemy

In the movie cars, one of the characters named Sarge (World War II Veteran) played as an army jeep, warned his friends, saying “The government is feeding us a bunch of lies man”..

This is how I feel with big technologies ruling our lives, they feed us a bunch of lies and manipulate us.

There was one talk on TED, a former Google engineer, who related a story of how Google, Facebook, YouTube and those big companies ‘manipulate’ us to stay on their platform.

Their job is for you to continue scrolling Facebook, to open your eyes and continue watching Netflix (that freaking auto-play got me) and you stay close to your smart phone. They dialed that in to an exact science, or a bunch of data and statistics.

In that engineer’s talk, he was basically saying, these giants, would use anything so you are glued to their platform. They have to do this, since us, the consumer, is their bread and butter for advertising. Without us, I don’t think their ad revenue would roll.

Winners are Trackers

You probably asking why wage war.

Because I am an entrepreneur with a full time job. That means I only have 3 hours maximum everyday to work on my business and launch my start-up.

It is therefor very important for me to measure and track how many hours to I spend in social media and Netflix.

You cannot control what you cannot measure, so I started tracking how many hours I spent on this platforms. My goal was to lessen the time I spent so it can free me doing things that are more productive.

On Facebook, I counted the hours I was in their platform, in it was an average of 2 hours per day. The good thing is that Apple reports these numbers to me, so I’ll start with that. (If you don’t know how, in the General Setting of your iPhone, check screen time, and Apple will report it to you weekly).

Again, I spend an average of 2 hours per day on Facebook. Typical average for every Americans.

But if you look at that number closely, that’s 14 hours a week (168 hours a month). I mean what can you do with that extra 28 days in a year?

Answer — Write a blog about productivity and turn it into a book. And work on my business too.

I been trying to avoid time wasters like these: watching Netflix, browsing on social media and the like. But last weekend irritated me because I have a presentation to finish and I still watched 6 hours worth of movies. In the end, I have to rush everything on Sunday.

So I started a cold war against these time wasters. I am a mom with a full time job but also an aspiring entrepreneur. This leads me to researching and understand how ‘they’ manipulate you and me to staying in their platform and waste our our time.

On Facebook, I figured it out. I put a limit to the Apps I wanted to limit. For example, on Facebook, I limit my screen time to an hour a day.

I think I toned it down more and cut my screen time by 30 minutes. Next time will be just five minutes.

They say that an average person scrolls their Facebook page to an average height of the Empire State Building, that means, I cut that height already by half.

Netflix, usually use the auto-play feature so that you, the consumer, just needs to open your eyes, in order to continue watching. To battle continuous watching, I removed the auto-play feature already and I’ve been cutting down watching Netflix a lot.

Anatomy of a binge watching

I’m pretty good in not watching Netflix and even Amazon Prime for the purpose of just killing time. When I dissected how I usually start watching Netflix, it usually happens after dinner, when my wife goes to the bedroom and turns on the TV.

Then I start watching.

I counter this one with a habit stacking strategy or what psychologists call an implementation intentions. In habit stacking, you usually pair your new habit with a pretty reliable habit.

My habit of watching Netflix after dinner comes before dinner. What happens is that after I turn on the dishwasher, I go straight to the bedroom AND then watch Netflix.

The solution was that I need to stack my old habit with a new habit. The new habit should not include the bad. So I stack my habit of after dinner, I’ll go work on my business, and it’s been working.

My drastic move was attaching a timer to the outlet (you know that Christmas Lights Timer from Lowes) of my TV.

Man, it works so good, it’s like somebody splashed me with water when I past the time I allocated for watching Netflix.

I think I’m in control, and I have more time working for my business.