I stopped watching Netflix for 1 month and this is what happened…
Yeah, that’s right! I actually stopped watching all video services and also stopped reading the news for the month of January! Why would I ever decide to do this crazy thing?
I’ve been reading many books about being effective and they all talk about time wasters with the goal of reducing or eliminating them. Time wasters in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” are anything that falls into the unimportant category (bottom half of the table, item #3,#4), especially “Not Urgent/Not important #4”.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | 1 | 2 (Goal) |
| Not Important | 3 | 4 |
24.5 Hours wasted for me each week
Guess what, watching entertainment video falls into that category for me and reading the news during the day as well. I did a little math and I was watching about 2 hours a night of video and reading the news for about 1-1.5 hours a day. If we take into account the loss of time from context switching between work and reading news and back I think that is pretty accurate. So 2 hours of video per night + 1.5 hours of news * 7 = 24.5 hours! If we look at a typical 8 hour work day, that is the same as 3 work days. Crazy!
Oh, the addiction..
During the first 2-3 days I found myself instinctively reaching for my phone every time I got bored and starting to open a news site. I would catch myself and before the page loaded, I would close the browser. Oh my god, I was addicted to reading the news when I was bored! After the first week it became easier. I still had the itch to use my phone when I got bored so I would check my email (which I am trying to cut down on as well) and look at the weather forecast. I figured the weather forecast is really not news. As you can imagine, the weather was super boring! So this did not become a new habit. The weather almost felt like those nicotine patches smokers use to curb the urge.
On the Netflix side, I noticed that since I stopped watching, the evening would come and I would be bored. Yes, boredom happened to me and I just let it be. You may not understand how unique that is because I have 2 kids, my startup work, a spouse, a small real-estate business I run. Boredom was not something I would experience for any length of time, but now I did. It was an old familiar friend and I embraced it. Some evenings I chose to do some work on the website, write a blog article, or fix a software bug in the software. Most of the time I decided to simply go to sleep.
Well rested
I’ve been getting much better sleep and have been feeling much better in the mornings. Some times since I was sleeping earlier I would wake up earlier feeling refreshed and would do some work things that I’ve been itching to do before the usual morning routine with the kids as they prepared to go to school.
Temptation
Google was definitely noticing my absence (or maybe this became more obvious to me) and their AI algorithms would not have any of this behavior. The default google screen on my browser, which usually just had a search box, started showing me news stories it knew I was interested in from my old days. I figured out how to open a browser with a blank screen to remove this.
Netflix too sent me emails. “You were in the middle of this awesome Star Trek Episode, its waiting for you to finish it”. I quickly moved forward from that email. Netflix again, “New season of the dark Sabrina Teenage Witch” was now live. Oh, the temptation, but I resisted, and just said no.
Kids
My kids noticed I was using my phone less and paying attention to them more (a positive). They even said they liked that I stopped watching video and reading the news (mainly commenting on me not watching my phone when I was with them). Amusingly one night my son saw me on my laptop when we were on a trip. He said “oh daddy”. I said “you don’t understand, I am not watching video or reading the news anymore so I decided to do a little work.” He said, “oh, thats great. ok, no problem”. It was an interesting reaction.
A little weird
One of the side effects of the news blackout was that I heard things like “You don’t know about the Cornovirus outbreak, really?” I was also asking my friends about the impeachment trial and what was the latest. I was surprised to see Tesla stock had sky rocketed as I purchased some a long time ago. All and all I don’t think I missed that much.
So what now?
January and the experiment is over. Now I have to decide what I want to do long term. We limit our kids to 2 hours of TV per weekend. I think I am going to adopt that policy for myself as well. Its enough to have a little video fun but not consume a massive amount of time. As for reading the news, after catching up on a few political articles, I am choosing to continue this habit and rely on my friends or random times to catch anything really important. I will be doing a deep dive into social media/marketing in Feb as part of my efforts to get the word out about Yomez so I’m curious to see how that will change things.
Overall this experiment was a really fantastic experience. It showed me that I can choose to change something that has long been a habit of mine, that I can experience the consequences of choosing this path, and that all in all, it was a very positive experience for me. I think choosing a limited time frame to start, like January, was really helpful because whenever I wavered I would think, its only 1 month. I feel more empowered to do other such experiments and look forward to seeing the results!
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