As my number of students has been increasing, one thing that I have been cautioned about is not to let my work take over my life. I thought that was not going to be an issue for me (what life? only half joking here). But then I started to pay a bit more attention. What is the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning (even if it's at 4:30 am?), check my email and see if any students have signed up or contacted me. What am I doing at 9:30 in the evening? Contacting students and fixing my schedule for the next week or month. What happens when I'm out for a meal with family? I happen to check my phone and see my online teaching schedule for the week and start checking to make sure it's correct. Uh, yeah, it's kind of taking over my life. So, what am I doing about it? A lot has to do with my phone. It's always with me and so easy to sidetrack me with just getting this done now, and I hate having alerts and notifications staring at me. Here are the actions that I am taking to try to disconnect from my phone, especially as it is related to work and teaching.
Step 1: I set downtime for my phone from 10pm to 6am. That means I would have to consciously override my settings if I wanted to do work when I should be sleeping. I actually have noticed that I sleep better when grabbing my phone and "just checking real quick" is not an easy option.
Step 2: I am training myself to see my phone as personal and my computer as work. Now that I have a laptop that has a working battery (yay!) I can do my emailing and messaging with online students from my laptop when I am consciously working, wherever I am. So I have taken my work email off of my phone. I can still access it if I need to, but again, I have to intentionally change a setting in order to do that.
Step 3: This is not so much related to work, but as to how much time I mindlessly use my phone, which spills over into being more productive/getting actual work done, and this is setting daily limits on certain apps. Once I actually saw the breakdown of how much time I was spending every week on Facebook, playing games on my phone, etc. I started setting limits that were more in line with how I want to spend my time. Yes, I can (and do) override the time limits sometimes, but at least I am aware of how much time I spending doing those things.
So, those are just a few things that I'm doing to try to not allow my work to take over my life...and gain some self control when it comes to my phone. Hopefully, one day soon, I won't be telling my students "Here, let me put a note about that in my phone...my phone controls my life."
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