- You gotta honor that if you're gonna say
I'm putting down the phone between seven and nine o'clock
tonight and I'm actually just gonna be present with you
you've got to honor it.
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- It's an excellent question.
I think if you're present to whether or not
you're kind of in the zone of time
where it's cool to be fluid,
you're kind of with the family, you're also
sort of present on your phone, that's cool.
If you've decided that because my kids
are starting to complain or my fiance's starting
to complain that I'm always like this
then you gotta honor that if you're gonna say
I'm putting down the phone between seven and nine o'clock
tonight and I'm actually just gonna be present with you
you've gotta honor it.
So what I will do is I'll just jot a note to myself
so instead of picking up the phone,
I'll just jot a note down and it's only
because I have the propensity to work 24/7
'cause I love what I do and I love responding to people
on social and I love seeing all the stuff that's going on.
Set a quitting time every single day,
now I usually I'd say about 65% of the time
I honor it, it's not foolproof but it works
the majority of the time and you've had
the experience right where you gotta be in a meeting
at the school or you have to catch a plane
or you've got a doctor's appointment
and have you ever noticed that when you've got
an anchor like that your whole day condenses
and you're more productive 'cause you've got
this deadline?
And that's called Parkinson's Law,
so Parkinson's Law, it's a research-backed fact
that when you have work to do,
it will expand to the amount of time that you have
to do it in, so if you have 20 minutes
to make a call, how long will it take you?
- [Crowd] 20 minutes.
- If you have two weeks to make it
how long will it take you?
- [Crowd] Two weeks.
- Correct!
So if you every day no phone in your room,
you set that one priority that matters to you
if you got time to kind of inch it forward
just a little bit, great, you've already made progress,
you're done for the day then you look at your phone,
you also set a quitting time right then and there,
the majority of days you'll honor it
and that quitting time means for me it means
I'm not on my phone and everybody that works for me
knows if there's an emergency or if we have to do something
they'll call me so that helps a lot.
Does that answer hep you?
- [Woman] Yeah, it does.
- Excellent.
There is like some pretty interesting research
around how long you can focus.
You guys remember when we took standardized tests
how when you were done with the test
you had this massive headache?
Felt like your brain was pushing?
It's because your prefrontal cortex was so gassed,
it had to focus for so long,
that it was tired.
The reason why we have habits that get automated
is to give your prefrontal cortex a break.
Because if your brain had to focus on everything
intently 100% of the time it would not be able to do it,
it would blow up in your head, so the reason why
it goes back and forth between behaviors
that are patterns and behaviors that cause you
to be intentional is because your brain
needs to take these little breaks.
What you're dealing with is you've developed a habit
that gets triggered by that feeling
so when your brain starts to feel gassed
that's the trigger, this part of the brain takes over
and what your pattern you're repeating
is social media, so the fastest way to stop that
is when you catch yourself on social media
in that instance five, four, three, two, one
to override the pattern and then get up
and take a quick walk.
A three minute walk literally even into the kitchen
or around the block or go outside and take a phone call
or something, it's remarkable how that will help a lot,
okay?
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