What Happened When I Actually Took My Screen Time Seriously for 30 Days

Sam Vander Wielen: So we all know that moment. It happens every single Sunday when your phone pings and all of a sudden you’ve got a little screen time report there waiting for you, and you’re like, I don’t know, should I open it? Should I not open it? I don’t know how I did this week. And then you see it and you’re like, wait, what? I spent how much time on my phone doing what?

It’s like your screen time doesn’t match up to the life that you say you want to live and frankly, when you see that little screen time report, you’re like, maybe that’s why these two things don’t match up.

I know you wanna live a life where you feel more present, less irritable, and have the time and space and ability to be present, to do the deep work that you really want to do.

Your phone is supposed to be a tool for your business, but honestly, it’s kind of feeling more like an appendage. The issue is our phones are our businesses, but they’re also where we live our lives. It’s where we take all the millions of photos of our pets and our kids. It’s where we communicate and keep in touch with loved ones.

It’s where we get the notifications about that new Serena and Lily rug that we ordered today that’s gonna be delivered, and it’s the thing you use to scan the plane tickets to go on that trip that you’ve really been looking forward to.

For the past year, I’ve been on a journey learning how to reduce my screen time significantly and focusing on what I do off of that screen time. So in today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about kind of how it’s been going, a little check in on my own screen time, what I’ve actually done to reduce it that’s worked, where I’ve fallen off, and what usually helps me to get back on track without shaming or judging myself.

If you want to create a healthier relationship with your phone and build a business that doesn’t require you to be on it 24 7, then this episode, and frankly this podcast are for you.

Speaking of welcome back to On Your Terms®. On Your Terms®, is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses and I can’t think of a better topic to talk about than how much time we spend on our phones because these two things are related not only to how present you are in your life, but also to how profitable you are in your business ’cause you can’t be really profitable in your business if you’re doom scrolling and you definitely can’t be present in your life either.

Before we dive into today’s episode, I’ve been doing this new segment where I pull a random card, a discussion question, answer it, and I invite you to answer it or journal it, um, this week too, alongside me. And if you wanna share your response with me, I would love to hear it so you can always reach out. But here’s the question of the week.

If you didn’t worry about the consequences or what other people thought, what’s something you’d love to do? I had a different answer for this when I’ve heard, I’ve heard this question in the past, but the other night, so we’ve been in Chicago for the last week, reshooting all of the videos for the Ultimate Bundle® and the other night we went to Second City in Chicago and watched, um, standup and improv. And when I was a kid, did a lot of acting in like summer camps and all this stuff for fun, went to drama camp. Absolutely loved acting, loved singing, all of the things. And I was telling the girls when we were at Second City that if I didn’t worry about like how stupid I would look and I don’t know, just even would have like the ability to like loosen up enough, I would love to do improv. It looks so fun and I would love to like go just run with it.

I’ve even thought about like trying to go and be in like a local play again or do something like that, but it’s just so funny how I didn’t think twice about it when I was a kid. But now I would be so worried about what I would look like and sound like, and I think when I was a kid I just thought I was good at it and bless my little heart. I don’t think I was, but it was really, really fun.

Okay, let’s get into today’s episode.

So just to catch you up on my screen time journey, I started talking about this on the podcast last year about how this was like a major goal for me was just to reduce my screen time, and it’s not just about literally reducing the screen time. It was really about what that meant and felt like to me to be on my phone so much.

Also the fact that it drew or like highlighted for me all of the things that I wasn’t giving attention to and so, like I said at the top of this episode, I couldn’t help but make the connection. Like when I would get that little screen time report every Sunday, and I’m not kidding you, it used to say eight hours, something like this.

Sometimes it was many, many hours, like four hours on Instagram a day or something like this. I would kind of see that distance between like, this is how I feel, I feel terrible. I don’t like this. I’m irritable, I’m not present. I am like always feeling like I’m comparing myself, like I’m not good enough. Nothing quite felt great or, or even like, I would brown out for my day.

Like I would look back at my day and be like, I don’t really remember exactly what happened or I’d come home from certain situations and be like, I don’t even remember being there that much because I think I was on my phone the whole time.

So I would sort of start connecting that feeling to the like hey, you’ve been feeling down about the fact that you’re not reading as much as you normally do. Like I love to read, I read a lot of fiction and you know, it’s easy to fall into this trap where you’re like, well, I don’t read ’cause I don’t have time. And then you get your little screen time report and you’re like, do you though?

Do you not have time? So that’s, you know, that’s sort of what started this for me was like feeling this dissonance between these two parts of my life of like seeing how much time I was spending and then making that connection of like, well, I’m also not happy with how much I’m moving my body, or how much I’m reading, or how much time I’m spending with friends or doing something that’s not related to work, for example.

I was talking with a friend about this earlier today, like it is also true and I’m of the belief that there’s a lot, like screen time gets a bad rap and the amount of time we spend on technology gets a bad rap at the same time. I don’t live near any of my family.

A lot of my friends are scattered all over the country, right? So it’s like it’s a communication tool. It’s also what I use for work and whether I like it or not, I have an online business, so like the bulk of my business is online. It’s going to be through things that I can access on my phone, like apps and different tools and you know, as a team we use Slack and we use Asana. I do post Instagram as part of my job. It is part of my job.

It’s just that when you start analyzing your screen time at first, if you get honest, if you’re really honest with yourself. There’s like a line that you can draw where you’re like, okay, up until this point it was work or up until this point it was communicating with loved ones and like that communication feels good. Like that is something that’s positive that adds to my life. Or if you look at my Peloton time, for example, like I use my phone to access the Peloton app a lot because I meditate on it twice a day. I’m obsessed with their morning meditation. I love their sleep meditation. That’s a lot of time. I also use it for my exercise. There are all these things, but you can draw this line sort of where you’re like, alright. Up until there I’m, I’m like kind of comfortable with that and I can admit that we just live a lot of our lives through apps and our phones. That’s fine.

But if I was honest with myself, there was a tipping point where it was no longer that, it’s not even that, it’s not excusable ’cause I don’t want to use like a lot of shame language or something like that. It’s more like at some point it just doesn’t make you feel good. Like this wasn’t adding to my life. In fact, I’d make the argument that it was actually detracting from my life, at some point. You, you need to find that as we’re having this conversation today, like. You really need to find that, um, line for you. Like I’ve seen people say before, like, try to spend less than one hour a day on your phone or try to do this or try to do that.

Like I just, I don’t believe in these like hard and fast rules. For a lot of things, but let alone for, for this either, because your life might be really different. Like you might need to use it for certain things.

I know when my dad was sick, I was on my phone so much because it was my way of not only keeping in touch with him, but also communicating with all his doctors, ordering his meds. Like there just are times in seasons in your life and so I think it’s about finding that tipping point line for yourself where you’re like, this is the time that I spend on my phone that actually contributes to my life, it makes me feel good, and then this other time, or these other tasks or apps don’t, right? And so that’s where you start to see it tip over.

So that’s really how I started, was just started paying attention to this, like feeling like that number was too high. My life was out of balance with really where I wanted it to be. And then starting to notice where were like, where were the things or where were the tools or programs or whatever that were not making me feel great. Where was I getting stuck? What was causing me to like just go down some doom scrolling rabbit hole on my phone.

I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast before, but for me, that domino, that that like problem child is Instagram, right? For everybody it can be different. I know people who use their phones to like play games a lot, right? Like, I’m not a games person, but I know that that’s something that people end up spending a lot of time doing. For other people it’s other social apps, like it might be Discord or it might be, uh, TikTok or YouTube or Twitter X, whatever we’re calling it. So. You know what your thing is and so the point is I think that the pivotal moment for me where this changed was identifying my problem domino.

And so Instagram was my problem, domino with my phone. It was the thing that not only did I spend a lot of time on it, itself, but the use of it then had me on my phone more period. Like it just then had me, you know, you’re on your phone, then you see a notification, then you remember you forgot to like order the dog’s food. Then you forget that you forgot to send your sister a gift and it’s her birthday and like it’s just like an hour and a half later you’re like, I haven’t done anything and I was supposed to do all these other things. And I say, I wanna read more. And here we are. So. That was my, yeah, that was my tipping point where I kind of identified like, this is my problem.

So then I kind of came to a fork in the road of like, okay, well what am I going to do? Because we have businesses, right? So this is where this tension lies. We have online businesses. We want to run these businesses. We say, right, what do we do when the tools that we need to run our businesses are also the things that can start to make us less present in our life?

So this is when I started to actively reduce my screen time just by the I, I would even just say like by the mindset. Um. Like identification, that this was an issue of being like, I don’t like this. This thing is going on. I don’t like it. This is why, this is how it’s making me feel. This is how I wanna feel instead, I’m starting to just be observant and curious about this instead of shaming myself. Oh, I see that Instagram is the domino that leads me to not only be on Instagram, but to use my phone in general. And so let’s just start there. Let’s just start. Seeing, like observing my relationship with Instagram, being more present and conscious of it honestly, and it really started as simple as that.

Like I didn’t need some sort of like wild cold Turkey thing or I don’t know, going through like any major hoops. I didn’t buy any technology. I know that there are so many different apps and tools, but I think it’s important to like mention off the jump that you don’t have to buy something necessarily in order to reduce your screen time or change your relationship.

I think that these things can be really helpful. I think that it can sometimes not address like the poor behavior though. And I think like where the reason I’ve been able to so drastically reduce my screen time over time has be been because I’ve attacked like the core habit or the core behavior and not just like thrown over a barrier to like making it more difficult.

Like I really needed to get more to the root of like, why are you looking to this thing so much? Why? Why is it that you’re on your phone so much, but yet you say you wanna do all these other things? Like does it worry you or freak you out to like, go try to train for a triathlon for the first time, for example.

And you’re saying you wanna do that, yet you’re literally sitting on your phone watching videos of women doing triathlons and being like, wow, how I love to do that instead of actually just going out and trying and doing it myself, right.? So I really had to get, I think just get more to like the root of this behavior.

So within like weeks or just even a month or two, I was able to start reducing my screen time down to five hours a day. So I went from eight hours a day to five hours a day within just a couple of weeks. And I was like, okay, this is a big improvement, but now I think I can continue to do more. So that is when I started deleting Instagram off of my phone.

So. I treat Instagram like work because frankly it is work. So I put Instagram on my phone, I download it as an app. I do what I need to do, like make a post, or post to my Instagram stories, do some engagement, we have a whole system as a team where any dms that need to go to, to me personally, um, kinda get slotted into one folder and things that are more generic that the team can answer where it’s somebody’s looking for something or a link, um, or something that we can help them with, we put it into the general folder. And so I will go in, I will answer what I would like to answer, and then when I’m done, I go on my phone, hard press the app, and I delete it.

And I literally just got in the habit of going in, doing my work, deleting it right away. Because what I noticed in times that I’ve fallen off the wagon. Is that if I even just so much as forget to delete it and then I realize it’s there later, I will just accidentally end up back down that rabbit hole. So just getting in the practice of regularly deleting this app, that’s when something incredible happened that I didn’t expect.

Around this time when I had gotten it down to the five hours per day, which is that’s, that sounds like a lot to me still, but when I had gotten it down to this and gotten into the habit of deleting the app, I noticed something shifted with my relationship in general with my phone.

Essentially my phone started feeling very boring. I would go to my phone to scroll or like, I don’t even know. I would kind of open it up and be like, it’s like as if, it’s like when you rummage through the cabinets, like in the pantry and you’re really hungry, but nothing’s hitting the spot. That’s kinda my best way of describing it.

It’s like you’re looking for a snack. You want sweet, but all you have is salty. And so I would go in and to my phone and be like clicking around like, there’s nothing to do here. It was almost like somebody had like zapped all the color from my phone. That’s like the best way I can describe it. And that’s when things really shifted for me, where I would look up like a week, two weeks later and just be like, wow. I’m like, I’m never on my phone anymore. I’m really just not looking at my phone.

The most I’m using my phone for is to take pictures, uh, and for my life, right? Or of Huddy when he is doing something cute, my dog, or to look up a recipe right to cook. I love cooking, um, or to purchase something that actually contributes to my life, like a book from an independent bookshop or a to find directions to some fun place that I’m going. Like I was using my phone more in the way that I actually wanted to, and then like that, that’s more in alignment with my goals and my values, which is like to help me live a more fulfilling, present rich life, right? To be with my family, to be with my friends, to travel, to capture moments.

I love taking pictures. I love cooking, so I love how much access it gives me to all those things. That’s the relationship that I personally want with it. That’s when I started to really see that reduction in my screen time to go below three hours, sometimes as low as two hours. And this is with, by the way, running a full-time business, a multi seven figure business that requires me to be on my phone and to use technology a lot.

So you can imagine that that like the amount of time, even outside of work that I’m spending on my phone has significantly decreased. So for a long time now I’ve been kind of in this good phone place, but there are a couple of times when I’ve noticed I’ve fallen off the wagon and I think that’s really helpful for me to notice, let alone for me to share with you in case this happens with you and your journey to use your phone less.

So one of the things I’ve noticed is that in 2025, I traveled so much for work. Pretty much every single trip, I think every single trip outside of Brian and I went to Block Island and we went to Newport for two nights. Uh, every single trip was for work. And I, I don’t know, I must have traveled like 20 times I would say I, it was, it felt like so many times. And so I did a lot of trips for work and I noticed that when I would do these trips, it’s really fun to capture them like.

This is where part of the, I don’t know, sort of like cognitive dissonances for me is that like I really enjoy what I do for work and I enjoy taking pictures. I enjoy capturing it. I love like the creative side of like putting all these little clips together and making like, I was into like vlog style stuff before it was even a thing, and so I enjoy that, right? I like, like kind of bringing people along for the ride. I enjoy when other people do that for me, like I like watching all of you out and about in your life and seeing how you’re running your businesses and building your businesses, right?

So I enjoy that and that’s something I look forward to when I do these trips. And one of the things that I noticed on these trips is that then I get sucked back in because I’ll be like, well, I’m in Mexico, I’m not going to be like deleting and downloading this app because I have to be posting this, or I want to post this.

I wanna share about this trip, and then I will notice that if I don’t delete it right away when I come home, I sort of start to carry those bad habits. It’s like relapsing and carrying those bad habits back home with me. I would say the other thing that’s made this sort of hard this year is like also on these trips you meet a lot of people, or I have a lot of friends at like these conferences or things that I’ve gone to, and then it’s the way that they communicate with you.

And so people will often write to me on Instagram and like DM me something on Instagram and even, okay, if you’re listening to this and you have my phone number and you DM me something, please, please for the love of God, text it to me. Because people always DM me stuff and I’m like, you have my phone number just right to me.

And so it is hard because it’s like people, it is a way that we use to communicate with people we know. Right? And like even outside of like just sending each other. Funny reels. Right. But I, I, I do find it hard because it’s like, well, I don’t wanna be like removed from society. Like I don’t wanna be left behind.

And I was on a business trip this year where I had deleted the app and like a whole group of my friends made a plan to go somewhere and to all get together and I didn’t get it because I didn’t have the app. So like, it sounds kind of silly, but it’s just funny like when you’re, when you are trying to reduce these things and like everybody else is still sort of like participating in this thing.

So, yes, I have, uh, told people, like, I have told people like, Hey, I’m not on Instagram all the time. Can you write to me? People still don’t do it. So like, it’s, it’s just sort of one of the things. So I’m just saying this because it makes it hard or like tempting sometimes to be like, well, I don’t wanna miss out.

Like I don’t want people to not be able to reach me or when I’ve been on the trips and I do start sharing and I’m having fun sharing, uh, I have noticed that that’s sort of a portal back to like bad habits for me.

So, I’ve mentioned this before, but my mom was a doctor and when I was little, she was an integrative physician, so she was like way ahead of her time. She was a health nut before, like that was even a thing. And when I was little she used to have this like she would, she loved entertaining, so she would have big parties for people and like people’s birthdays every holiday. She loved entertaining and she had this attitude that about food for parties that she would always say Sammy, this is party food and when the party’s over the food is over. Now I’m not necessarily endorsing this like attitude towards food and she was pretty, she was pretty strict and like pretty rough around this kind of stuff.

The point being is that like I hear her in my head sometimes when I go on these trips, like where I am now in Chicago and I’m capturing and like I’ve been on my phone more for like content creation purposes in the last several days than I have probably in a month.

So I think about that attitude that my mom had about party food that I’m, like, when I leave here, party’s over. Like I, I, I am here to capture this experience, but I don’t need to carry that habit when I go home. And so I want to get back to my, like, my center, right? So I will delete the app probably when I’m on the plane, uh, on my way home.

And I will probably feel this weekend when I get back to New York a little uncomfortable. It’s, it’s really wild what ends up happening or maybe this is just me, but like when I delete the apps and when I get off, I will feel a little like scattered for a day or two and I notice that I, I sort of reset and I pick up much faster now it doesn’t take as much time. But if you are doing this for the first time or you’re early on in this process, you might notice that you get a little edgy and agitated or even reach for the thing, like phantom, go to apps that don’t exist on your phone, or something like that. So I’m just mentioning it because it’s, it’s nor in my experience, it’s normal. And when I’ve mentioned this to friends, they’ve said that they’ve felt similarly.

I think as part of the cycle of just, you know, practicing being compassionate towards yourself and not shaming or judging yourself as well, like just giving yourself a little compassion that it’s very difficult to, well, difficult to be a human in this world, period, let alone, uh, a human in this digital world, right?

Like I was saying, like friends are communicating through this app even though they have my phone number and stuff like that. Like, it’s hard and it makes sense, like you wanna see what’s going on and there might be a few people who you love. Like I love Cecilia Blomdahl, for example and like, I always wanna see what she’s up to on Svalbard because like I love watching her videos every Sunday, but then I’m like, but what’s Grim her dog doing, uh, this week? You know, like there are good things, there are positive things about being on there. That it, it makes sense to me like why you would feel left out or why there are, there are just gonna feel like there are downsides to not being there. And so I think that’s part of it is just being like, yeah, there are some good things, but like, does this overall make me feel good about myself?

Does it make me feel closer to my community? Does it feel more connected to my goals? You know, do I think that me not maybe getting, uh, more connected to my community or achieving my goals has anything to do with how much time I’m spending consuming everybody else’s experience in their community. So I, I think it’s just that balance of like, being kind to yourself of like, it makes sense to me. This is kind of the way the world works.

It also makes sense to me that this thing has been built to be addicted to, right. And so like, it’s a very, um, it’s like shaming yourself for being addicted to sugar. Like it tastes good. Like it makes sense to me.

So, uh, yeah, I just think that that’s, you know, it’s worth mentioning and like not beating yourself up over, and I think it’s just continuing to come back to how you really wanna live your life and what you’re willing to sacrifice for your business, right?

And I for me in the past year, I was just like, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my being present in my life for my business anymore. I had this kind of idea or this image of like being 80 something years old and maybe this is something that happens like once your parents died too and you just, like, you watch people literally take their last breath and then you think like, I don’t wanna be there and like look up from my phone and be like, wait, what happened?

Like what? What just happened? The last 40 years just went by and I watched people like chopping vegetables on Instagram. That’s not how I wanna live my life. And so, there’s no, there’s no right or wrong here. There’s no, like, you don’t have to live your life the way I live my life. It’s about knowing how you want to live your life and being really clear about that, and then making sure your actions are consistent with that.

One of the really cool things, or like unexpected surprise side effects that I’ve heard from so many of my customers especially you’ve bought the Ultimate Bundle® and like use that to start their online businesses, is that they feel like it allows them to be more present in their lives. ’cause they can drop a lot of the anxiety and the worry and concern that they’re not doing it right when it comes to starting their online business.

So, all that to say, I’ve got my first live class, , of the year coming for you in just a couple of weeks. We usually fill this up really, really fast. Last time we had 8,000 people sign up for this. And so we only host this twice a year and it opens in like a week. So, uh, just all that to say, make sure you go down below and make sure you get my weekly emails called Sam’s Sidebar so that you’re the first to know when my free legal class opens up for 2026.

I am not gonna host it again until the end of the year, so hopefully I will see you there. Hopefully I just see you in my weekly newsletter inbox. Anyway, people love it. Over 55,000 of your peers get my weekly emails called Sam Sidebar so that they learn how to grow their online business.

So with that, Thanks so much for listening. I can’t wait to chat with you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.