Screen Time

What is the most important feature on your smart phone?

The search engine? The easy accessibility to your personnel information? Your social accounts? 

Your music? Contacts? 

Each one is important at the moment. But the most important aspect of the smart phone isn’t an app, it’s the data that tells us how long we’ve been spending looking at our screens, scanning through pictures, reading the net, or text with friends. Screen time section in the settings is the smart phone version of a scale. It gives us an assessment of who we are on a daily basis. It shows us our true self and we cannot fudge about the results. The scale never lies, nor does the screen time.

The results are what economist call “Opportunity Cost.” This represents the potential benefits that a business, an investor, or an individual consumer misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. Forcing us to ask the most basic question of all: Was the time spent on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok worth it? Time is money. If we spend too much time staring at a screen, we need to understand the residual effects each second. 

For us to be an effective leader, we must lead ourselves first. And to lead ourselves effectively, we must have a self-leadership culture. Reviewing the screen time app is our first step towards developing our self-leadership culture. It allows us to identify our habits. Developing self-leadership requires you to become more aware of the thoughts in your mind and then turn them into positive, productive beliefs. That requires a lot of introspection and a much deeper understanding of yourself.

Write down your daily routine and most recognizable habits. Why do you do those things? Why are they important to you? What do you gain from taking those actions? Are your habits leading you toward the life you want or just toward the limited life you believe you deserve? What do you really believe you deserve, and why? When you see that you have spent 6 hours per day on your smart phone, is forces you to ask, is this what I want to become? 

The screen time reality forces us to take our first step towards our self-leadership culture. It requires us to be self-accountable. And if we cannot be accountable to ourselves, how can we be lead with accountability? 

The next step we must take is to regulate our behaviors. The more you can control your emotions and reactions to external events, the better your self-leadership. Strong leaders act on knowledge, wisdom, and goal orientation rather than pure emotion. If you can’t control yourself, it’s difficult to lead yourself effectively.

To fully lead yourself, there must be a generation of energy given to the work, with enthusiasm, confidence, and stick-to-itiveness. When those three are working in harmony, passion becomes contagious. 

The most important aspect of developing a self-leadership culture requires you to communicate with yourself and others clearly. Learning to speak to yourself with just as much respect and love as you speak to others will take you a long way toward self-mastery and success.

Aristotle once said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Viewing your screen time will be the first step towards self-mastery. How could there be a more worthwhile app?

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