My shortage of time keeps getting worse, why can’t I just make more?

I’ve spent 2.5 hours per day on Facebook last week, and this is how I will claim those time back.

I swiped my phone and then read a post from my friend yapping about not getting vaccine.

Her point is that that the government is feeding us a bunch of lies.

Then I commented, that I am a scientist, I worked with vaccines before (and these are the United States Department of Defense projects that I should not be discussing), and told them to F#@k off.

I waited for more comments and then answered back.

End the end, I told people in the comment thread that I wish the virus is like Ebola, where the symptoms is bleeding in your nose and any orifice in your body. Scary, and very deadly.

Now let’s see if they don’t want to be vaccinated.

Later, I was watching a video about a cat and it’s owner. It was cute so I stuck around. The Facebook Ad showed up so I waited until it was done.

Moments later, Apple notified me that I only have 5 minutes left using Facebook App.

The notification moved me out from my mindless scrolling and realized, I burned almost 2 hours already of my day.

— —

I was once in a marketing conference, and one of the guy who was expert in Facebook marketing told the crowd that an average person spend 2 hours and a half glued to Facebook.

That makes me an average Facebook scroller.

The speaker continued that the distance covered for swiping our smartphone is equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building. That tall huh?

For marketers, it’s good, because our job is to bombard you with ad to buy products you need.

For me, who tries to be good in my time management, 2.5 hours is no good to waste.

Gurus in the time management space always tell the story that you, me, Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Steve Jobs have one thing in common — we all have 24 hours in our day.

But they are more successful, why? They don’t have more time than anybody else. So how do they do it like they have 52 hours in a day?

Can we make more?

Of course we cannot, but we can take back our time and stay away from scrolling Facebook and Tick-Tock (or Netflix or whatever poison you are taking in).

Here’s what I did.

I told my wife to change my Facebook password Sunday night. Come Monday morning, when I came to work and in my downtime, what I usually do is fish my phone, and mindlessly clicked on the Facebook app logo.

Now it says: “Password is incorrect”.

So I stopped scrolling Facebook.

The whole week.

Facebook — 0, Myself — 1.

This strategy is very common in the weight loss arena when you removed all the chips, ice cream and chocolates out of the fridge and pantry. Not easy.

Scientist calls this strategy a Ulysses pact (or I could be wrong). However, I don’t want to bore you with those scientific concepts. What I’m going to tell you exactly how I do it and it works.

Netflix

I have to admit, after dinner with my family, and then I start the dishwasher, what I’ve found is that I usually go straight in front of the television. I don’t have cable anymore, so I go straight to Netflix.

Two hours later, I finished a movie that I usually don’t like. Sometimes, I tell myself, it wasn’t a movie but a documentary that is educational. So credit me for that, but in the end, I still lost hours.

You know what I did?

I removed the Roku app remote control from my phone. And then, I hid the TV remote control from myself (my kid does it for me).

The hardcore thing that I did was purchase I timer for my power outlet. (You know those timer for your Christmas tree lights? I bought two of those). I put the other timer for my TV and then for our internet network.

I usually just watch Netflix for 15 minutes. The timer will shut off my TV in 15 minutes so I stop watching, and then I go back to work on my business.

For the network timer, I set the timer to cut the power from our network around 10:30 PM. So when the whole house is cut of the network.

So far so good. My kids hates it and my wife is not so much in board but it’s working.

So what do I do with those extra hours? I polish my medium draft and then work on my business.

Later, I’ll show you how my use Pomodoro App too to track my time put on business, improved my productivity too.