RNZ National Tech Tuesday with Jesse Mulligan and Daniel Watson – Need less screen time do you?

RNZ National Tech Tuesday with Jesse Mulligan and Daniel Watson – Need less screen time do you?


Jessie (00:00): RNZ National, it's Tech Tuesday, and joining me from Vertech IT Services, Daniel Watson. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel Watson (00:07): Good day, Jessie. How are you doing mate?

Jessie (00:08): Good, thanks. How's your daily screen time, Daniel?

Daniel Watson (00:12): Horrendous.

Jessie (00:13): Is it?

Daniel Watson (00:13): Horrendous. Yeah. I think one of those things about life in the modern era is that we're constantly inundated with calls upon our attention, which is what brought me to think about the issue that is in front of me today. I'm looking at my settings on my phone, and it's telling me that I spent four hours looking at my screen yesterday.

Jessie (00:41): Your phone screen or screens in general?

Daniel Watson (00:43):No, just my phone. Just my phone. I, like many people, get a little bit sucked into things like YouTube and Reddit, and I mean, not so much Facebook and that kind of stuff, but it's amazing how much time you can spend on there. And sometimes you actually need a little way just to go in there and check out what it is and give yourself some hard facts rather than it being a maybe I'm spending too much time on there, or I could probably do less.
(01:17):
And one of the reasons behind having a squizz at this kind of thing, and getting some hard facts behind it, is that there was a 2017 study in the States amongst adults, which was that essentially if you're spending more than six hours a day in front of a screen, and they didn't differentiate phones in there, they said any kind of screen , you're at a higher risk of depression. And mental health is something that should be dear to us all, because if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. It's worth taking a bit of a squizz, so my tip for this one is, and I've got the instructions for both Android and an iPhone is head to your settings menu.

Jessie (02:01):Yeah, I'm doing that now, and then, people can play along at home if they'd like to.

Daniel Watson (02:06): Well, then go down to Digital Wellbeing and Parental Controls, if you're on an Android, and if you're on an iPhone, select Screen Time, and from there, you'll be able to see all the data about your activity.

Jessie (02:22):That is fascinating. I never knew this tool existed on my phone.

Daniel Watson (02:28):And it breaks it down by the app, so you can see whether it's just email or if it's YouTube or if it's something else like a maps application.

Jessie (02:38):Would you like to take a guess at, and we're speaking at 11:30 in the morning. Would you like to take a guess at how much screen time I've had today?

Daniel Watson (02:47):Is it more than two and a half hours?

Jessie (02:50):It's not. It's 44 minutes.

Daniel Watson (02:52):Oh, see I went in and actually on the Android you can set a goal, and I said, "Oh, you know what, actually, probably three hours? I'll say it's three hours," and it said that I had like 25 minutes remaining.

Jessie (03:06):Mine's a nice healthy mix, too. I've got phone, Google, Spotify, Twitter, other. A lot on Gmail. Some on clock. That was when I was exercising, so it doesn't really count, and some on WhatsApp. A nice even spread around the rainbow, but this is so good to know about. And man, it would give you a bit of a fright probably at the end of the day if you checked.

Daniel Watson (03:28):I think the key thing with this stuff is not to give yourself a bit of a beating about it. It's just what is, and then, once you have the facts, then you can start putting a bit of subtle pressure on yourself to change it up.
(03:39):
And I know I've gone through, what would you call it? Cold turkey on certain media. I'm sorry to say, but I used to get quite involved in the politics and be listening to all the shows and chasing the articles online, and you can really get riled up, and I was kind of like going, "Man, I'm finding myself, I'm getting a bit outraged," and it's probably not super awesome for me and how I'm relating to my family if I'm in that kind of head state all the time.
(04:05):
So, I just decided, "You know what? I'm just going to delink myself from news sources and stay away from certain websites that wind me up," because at the end of the day, I vote in the elections. If it's really important, somebody at the coffee shop is going to tell me what the big news of the day was or something like that, but it's amazing how much you can get by without it.

Jessie (04:29):I've got a couple of podcasts I subscribe to, and some mornings I'll get in the car or be about to do some exercise, and I'll look at my phone to choose a podcast and look at them. And I'll think, "Not today. I can't start the day with this sort of wind up."

Daniel Watson (04:45) Yeah. And the other thing I thought was useful is that we are still in spring, we haven't hit summer yet, so the message of having a bit of a spring clean and also goes towards having a good head state about where you are on a day-to-day basis.
(05:02):
Because I know that everybody's to-do lists are much bigger than the time available they have for them, and one of those big distractors is email, and everybody's got an email account, and if you've had your same email address for 10, 20 years, as some of us do, the amount of... It's not just straight spam. It's just the piling snow drifts of unimportant emails that build up and make it hard for you to wade through to the letter box kind of thing, to get the true messages.
(05:37):
At the moment, right now, I'm looking at my Outlook, and I have 13,445 unread emails in there, and a great deal of them are informational. They're notifications of various things or other, and what I've been meaning to do is actually go through and just start sorting them by sender, and then, doing a big purge of those subscriptions and notifications and just turn them off entirely.

Jessie (06:09):Sorting by sender is a good idea.

Daniel Watson (06:12):Yeah, that's the first step, because then you can see who you're getting lots of messages from, and do you really care? Because it's quite easy to sign up for newsletters. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to get off the list.

Jessie (06:25):Or I just think maybe you got daily emails from people at work or whatever, and once the day is gone, this is particularly for me, because I run daily shows, but an email yesterday about radio or television means nothing to me today, because those battles have already been fought. So, maybe if I put in a, I hate to say this out loud, but a producer's name in my email, and I would know that anything that had come from them would be work related and in the past. And then, I can just delete them all at once.

Daniel Watson (06:54):And things like Outlook, you can produce rules like CCs, because I end up, being the business owner, I get CC'd into a lot of stuff because people think it's important that I should know about stuff. I'm kind of more worried about things that I have to do. So, if it's sent to me, I prioritize those messages, and if it's CC'd to me, I just squirt it into another folder that I take a look at maybe once a day, maybe two or three times a week.

Jessie (07:18):Very clever.

Daniel Watson (07:19):And if it's really important, somebody is going to knock on my door and say, "Hey, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan," and then I respond.
(07:25):
You've only got so much time, and you still have to spend time with your family and there's other external commitments and your hobbies and time with the wife that you need to include in there. And frankly, technology is great, and it enables a lot of awesome things that we can do with it. However, we can't let it subsume our life and drag us off what are true to our values.

Jessie (07:48):Yes, that's so true, and I feel like a lot of what you've been talking about today is taking control back, because the apps on your phone are incentivized to grab your time through notifications and other little tricks. And unfortunately, time with the children doesn't have the same marketing power behind it.

Daniel Watson (08:12):Although when you're in their presence, that's very powerful clickbait.

Jessie (08:14):That's true. A bad example.

Daniel Watson (08:15):They're very, very, very good at demanding and getting your attention.

Jessie (08:21):Love that. So, in terms of the screen time, because that's a nice starting point for everyone. Can you tell us again where to find those on the Android and iPhone?

Daniel Watson (08:30):So, on both Android and iPhone, you head to the settings menu, and then, on the Android it's called the Digital Wellbeing and Parental Controls, and from there you can tap to show your activity there. And under the iPhone it's called Screen Time.

Jessie (08:48):Maybe I should hand some control back to my parents, see if they can take responsibility for it, and stop me being on my phone so much.

Daniel Watson (08:58):Yeah, they probably don't even want to do that for you, mate.

Jessie (09:00):They're probably worse than me these days. Daniel Watson Vertech IT Services. Thank you for the prompt. Really appreciate it. Good chat.

Daniel Watson (09:09):Cheerio, Jesse.