INSIDE: You’ll learn five big-picture ways for screen time management + three ultra-practical ways to handle your screen time with grace.
I spent four days last week at our church’s our church’s annual Student Staff Retreat with 48 teenagers who didn’t have their phones. No distractions. No posting on Instagram or checking likes. No interrupted conversations. All presence. All board games. All face-to-face conversations.
As lovely as that sounds, it was hard for many of them. They felt disconnected from mom and dad and disoriented, because What do I do when I don’t have a phone? Do I look like a loser if no one is talking to me and I don’t have a phone to distract me or make me feel important?
Teenagers aren’t the only ones who feel this way. We do, too, and we don’t like it. We long to control our phone usage, specifically the kind that involves distracted scrolling.
In a completely unscientific poll I did on Instagram, 63% of you spend 4+ hours a day on your phone, while 5% spend less than two hours a day. If our phones were taken away for four days, I imagine many of us would be just as untethered and disoriented as the teens I spent time with last week.
So, how can we graciously get a grip on our screen time? (And by “screen time,” I mean time spent scrolling, shopping, and skim-reading, not the ways we use our phone for work or health.) What are healthy strategies we can use to interact with our devices?
We want to handle our phones well because we know we are meant for more.
C.S. Lewis said that we prefer mud pies to a holiday at the sea, and social media scrolling is our modern-day mud pie. The Lord offers us a holiday of oceanic connection, belonging, love, and service. We are women who don’t want to settle. Having said that, there’s no need to shame ourselves for our mud-pie making, AND there’s also no sense in staying there.
Here are five big-picture ways for screen time management:
1. Name beliefs or attitudes you might hold around your phone. For example, you might say that you believe you’re on your phone “too much” or that a better mom would engage more with her kids and less with her phone. Maybe you’d say all your screen time is valid and there are no issues. Whatever you believe about your phone and how you use it, write that down.
2. Get your GPS. How much time do you truly spend on your phone (or the apps that you feel like cause you the most shame or guilt)? You might be surprised by how much or how little time you spend, because we humans aren’t always the best at gauging time (I often think I’ve spent 5 minutes on Insta, when it’s been 20, while also believing it will take me 14 hours to clean out my closet when it actually takes only 90 minutes.) Use your Screen Time app to help you figure out actual time vs. perceived time.
3. Paint a picture of where you want to go. At the end of the day, how would you have liked to spent your time? Maybe you have a goal to read a certain number of books a month or to clean out a certain number of cabinets or to paint a specific room or gone to the pool with your kids once a week.
4. Ask yourself, “What am I getting out of being online?” There’s something you get by being in an online space. Maybe it’s avoiding a chore or breaking up yet another sibling fight. Maybe you feel like your time scrolling is “Me Time” that you never get enough of during the all-together, all-the-time days of summer. Maybe it feels like needed relief from boredom.
5. Finally, ask the Lord what He thinks about your screen time. Are there places in your heart He’d like to heal? Are there needs – like comfort and peace – that only He can offer?
If you’d like some ultra-practical ways for screen time management, try these:
Set a limit using Screen Time or the timer on your phone to limit your usage. Then don’t ignore them!
- Set a limit using Screen Time or the timer on your phone to limit your usage. Then don’t ignore them!
- If you scroll seven days a week, choose one day as a Sabbath day of rest.
- Allow yourself to scroll only at certain times of day. For example, your girl here checks Instagram during breakfast and mid-day around 3 p.m. Outside of those two windows of time, I’m off the app.
Friend, I’m guessing your heart is to love your people well in this season, and perhaps you feel like your screen time is getting in the way of that. Pay attention to that nudging. Then, investigate whether it’s true by looking at the numbers and asking the Lord what He thinks.
Grace-girls are honest about where they struggle and where they excel. Let’s wield our phones wisely, so we can swim in the seaside holiday of love, joy, hope, and peace the Lord gives to us.
