The Unseen Choice: what you’re really choosing when you scroll

These days, everyone has a story about how they sat down “just to relax and scroll for a few minutes”, and then they suddenly discover that an hour or more has disappeared. A glance at your screen time then reveals that, together with some optimistic scrolling earlier in the day, perhaps you’ve consigned 2 hours of your day to ‘lost in the scroll’.

The Hidden Cost

This may seem like a harmless pleasure on the surface, but what is the cost over a month? Or a year? Let’s dwell on saving an hour of lost scrolling time a day or thereabouts. That’s about 30 hours a month. If we consider we have about 8 hours of productivity time a day (based on your average working day), then in a month we have thrown away almost 4 days!

Here is the hidden cost - choosing to scroll is choosing it over something else. It says that right now I’m giving this choice the highest priority over other things I could be doing; other things that could be more beneficial to me and help me in the future. I’m choosing one version of my future self over another. Should we be doing this?

A Vote For ‘The Best You’

There are many future versions of you. Picture them as candidates in an election, and picture the one you would most like to vote for.

Is it the one who is healthy and fit? The one who enjoys walks with their family and who makes meatballs with their kids on a Sunday? The one who is confident at work because they’ve read those teamwork books? The one who knows how to play Christmas Carols on the piano at the next family Christmas? Perhaps it is the person who is ALL of the above?

Every minute or hour spent scrolling is a vote. A vote for becoming ‘The Best You’ or a vote for ‘Still The Same You’. The journey to your best self is the sum of those votes over months and years.

Meanwhile, something unseen is happening when you vote for scrolling. The Big Tech Algorithms convert your votes into revenue… for themselves. The Attention Economy knows that our attention is a finite resource and tries to mine that resource every day. They have all the tricks in the book at their disposal because they invented many of them. So time spent on your TikTok or Instagram feed is not only a lost investment in yourself, it’s another few dollars on their bottom line at your expense.

The Choice Challenge

Try this for a week.

• Make a list of things you want to get done.

• Then, when you find yourself scrolling, think to yourself “I have chosen this”

• Next, ask yourself “Is this the choice my Best Future Self would have made?” Remind yourself of the other choices you have on your list

• Now re-consider your choice. Do you want to change your choice?

Doing this re-affirms to you that you have made a choice, and it is one of many. Choosing where to spend your attention is important and it is totally within you control.

Screen Balance helps with this choice. By injecting custom-made and personalised videos into your social media feeds, you are given a chance to recognise that you have a choice and realise that your choice is within your power to change. Perhaps your chosen video is your “Best Self” from the future, reminding you of the power of your choice.

You will have thousands of these choices in your lifetime, and each one counts as a vote towards becoming who you want to be. The question is, do you want to win by a whisker or by a landslide?

5 Essential Tips to Maximize Study over Screens

Exams are stressful and study is hard. HSCs are rapidly approaching in Australia, and every family member wants the results to be good, both the students and their parents. It takes focus and dedication, and it can feel overwhelming. This feeling is only exacerbated when there is an added battle to overcome: the enticing and comforting lure of the social media feed, where 5 minutes of downtime can quickly transform into an hour of doom-scrolling.

There are plenty of posts out there about how to study better, but we want to help students avoid getting distracted by their smartphone and de-railing all the good study tips they have accumulated. Hopefully these suggestions will help you to beat the screen and study smarter (as well as harder) and get the most out of your HSC exam prep.

Don’t Cram! Study Regularly

Leaving your study late is a sure-fire recipe for extra stress, as you see the remaining days slowly diminish. Not only is smaller, regular study a more effective technique which relieves this stress, it is also an effective way of managing your screen time. Once you enter the ‘cramming zone’ leading up to the exams, the higher levels of stress will often result in seeking ways to relieve it, one of which is hopping on your phone.

Cramming also involves longer daily study periods which puts more stress on you to focus for longer. It is natural to want to take a break, but those breaks are more likely to have you reaching for your phone.

Study plans can help, and creating that plan earlier to stretch over a longer period will result in less stress as the exams approach. A plan for 20-30 minutes a day over 6 months is going to be more effective, both with the results and the temptation, than a plan for 6 hours a day in the last month.

Create a Phone-Free Zone

We all know that we are more likely to succumb to a temptation when it is easy to get to, and the most obvious reason is that it’s in our vision. You are more likely to snack on some chocolate if it is in front of you than if it is at the back of the fridge. In the same way, it is so tempting to pick up your phone if it is in sight and in easy reach.

Phones are a bigger problem however - they love to call to us and beg for attention! Often, one familiar ‘ding’ from our phone is enough to interrupt our focus and make us want to find out what just happened.

There’s an easy solution for this - while you are studying, mute your phone and put it in a different room. There are many apps which provide a ‘Focus’ or ‘Zen’ mode as well, which makes it more difficult to access your phone even if you do go an pick it up. After 10 minutes of continuous focus on your study, you will often find that you hit that ‘zone’ where you can easily do another half an hour.

Start a Study Group

Study groups come with plenty of benefits anyway, but one added bonus is that it is easier to manage phone distractions if you have a ‘study buddy’. Plan some time with a mate or two to study together, and make the joint decision to put your phones somewhere else, say in a box in the kitchen. Having your friends around will not only motivate you to all focus together and give everyone more support (by quizzing each other or asking questions), it will also create a social contract that make it harder for any one person to make a break for their phone.

Study First, Screen Later

We all know that leisure activities are enjoyable and we would rather do them than study. Most leisure activities have a natural limit however (e.g. most people go to the movies in the evening, and watching a sports match has a fixed length). Spending leisure time on a phone these days is almost limitless; social media feeds are endless and streaming services allow you to binge-watch anything. So we have to think about what limits we can put on ourselves.

Planning and committing to study first and leisure later is an effective reward strategy. Perhaps a friend or parent can help with this - commit to knocking of some study goals, or a time in the day, before they give you access to your phone. If you think this is too difficult then think of some activities to substitute for your phone if you are losing focus (go for a walk, do some push-ups, eat some fruit). They will give you something to do but they all consume a finite amount of time, allowing you to get back to study when you’ve finished.

Interrupt your Scrolling Habit

At some point, we will lapse. It might be an innocent slip-up or it might be a dip in motivation. When this happens, we need to be reminded of our goals and get some motivation. This is where Screen Balance can help. Screen Balance injects custom motivational videos into your social media feed in order to interrupt your scrolling and inspire you to make a better choice. Sometimes we just need a little nudge, and we also need to learn to exercise our self-regulation.

Screen Balance videos are highly personalized to you and your goals. You might see a video of your favourite scientist, sports team or even school-mate who speaks to you, saying “Hey Josh, have you finished your Marine Ecosystem Geography section yet? Exam’s in 3 weeks! You got this!”.

We believe that screen limits can be effective, but practicing making important choices at the right moments has greater benefits in the long-run. If you think this will help then find out more here!

Helping your Teen Master their Screen: Self-Control vs Limits.

The amount of time our kids spend on Social Media, or any type of screen time, is concerning to all parents. Not only do parents worry what their kids are watching, or how that time could be better spent, the frequent policing and monitoring of screen time also result in family tension. As kids get older, they want less monitoring and more autonomy. But the paradox is: the parents also want to give it to them. So what exactly is going on here?

The harsh truth is that the current age of Big Tech is pitting our kids against an almost unstoppable foe: the Social Media algorithm. In the past, teenagers needed to battle against TV and games. However TV followed a schedule and games could usually be completed, and also took place in a public place where time limits were perhaps more easily checked. Not only is the new devices of distraction able to fit in our pockets and taken everywhere, the Social Media feed is never-ending.

To make matters worse, it is also custom tailored to keep you scrolling; the world’s brightest minds have created them to keep fully-developed adults scrolling, to what chance do our kids have?

Maybe we just need to give them the right type of help.

Do Screen Limits Help?

There is no doubt that screen time limits are helpful, and there are plenty of products to help us do this. Thankfully the need for these was recognized by the Big Tech companies and they come built-in with mobile devices. But while they are effective for a desired outcome of limiting screen time, they might not be effective for helping teenagers develop their own self-regulation skills.

There are also side-effect that come with strict screen time regulation. Communication with your peer group is still important, and while parents might reminisce about long phone calls and hang-outs in the park, in the modern day that is being replaced with digital forms of ‘hang-outs’ which are still important. Because mobile devices really are universal gadgets that do everything, hard limits on screen time may unknowingly deprive them of this benefit.

Social media on the other hand is one-way consumption, and doesn’t provide the same benefits as communication apps. While video chats, voice calls and maybe even text chats can give kids some kind of social development (although not as good as in-person), scrolling through social media does no such thing, and may even contribute to anxiety, feelings of isolation and FOMO (thanks to people’s natural instincts to only post the best version of themselves).

So parents are stuck - on the one hand, hard limits are clearly a benefit, but on the other they might deprive kids of some things that are actually valuable.

Shift to Self-Control

On top of this, there is the tension of the desire to transition to being an adult. All teenagers grow up seeing their parents and other adults having control over their own lives (and the own devices), and want to achieve the same. As part of their developmental process, we the parents need to help them transition to being adults and with that comes the responsibility to make their own decisions. Screen limits don’t help with this.

Some advice out there involves providing alternative activities: “Let’s make a cake together”, “Let’s go shopping for X”, or “How about I drive you to your friend’s house?”. This is an excellent strategy but it requires the parent to be there. Thankfully, most teenagers also have goals and things they want to achieve: perhaps it’s a fitness goal, or reading for English class, or practicing an instrument for a recital. Kids that are engaged in these goals are already one step ahead in their journey to self-control.

Beyond Limits

This is where Screen Balance comes in. Our goal is to hook into the things teenagers want to achieve and help them develop self-regulation. We do this by generating tailored coaching videos which interrupt the social media feed with 3 key ingredients:

• Addressing the viewer by name: “Hi Laura!”

• Referring to the goal that they have set themselves: “How far are you through The Great Gatsby?”

• Appearing as someone or something with a connection to both: In this case perhaps the message is delivered by a character from the novel that Laura has chosen

With these elements in place, the viewer is snapped out of their scrolling and is given the best opportunity possible to make a good choice: spend some time working towards their goal instead of wasting the time on scrolling. Not only does this aim to help direct their attention to where it is best needed, but it also trains their self-control muscles to get better at making similar decisions.

We want this to sit alongside screen limits, with the goal of slowly replacing them. On the way, we also hope that a healthy family dynamic is restored. If this sounds like something you want to try, you can read more here.