Why I Turned OFF the Internet for a Week - And You Should Too

Welcome to the Prompt. I'm Jim Carter. This show guarantees tech news and updates that shape your life and future. Since it's essential now to stay on top of AI, we'll figure it out together so you don't fall behind. I'm here to explain it, offer some deep insights and spark a little curiosity along the way. If you're a techie like me or just AI curious, hit that follow button for the advantage you deserve. Let's dive in. Hey there. Welcome back to the Prompt. I'm Jim Carter and today we're diving into a topic that I personally think is incredibly important and highly underdone. The power that comes from disconnecting and taking a real break from technology. I just got back from an incredible week long cruise vacation with my wife Val and our girls. We took the kids out of the country for their very first time and cruised from our hometown port in Southern California down to Mexico. We hit up Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas. It was an absolute dream. But this vacation was a little different for me. Actually, it was very different. Not only was it our kids first international adventure, but I also made the intentional choice to completely disconnect from the Internet for the entire duration of the cruise. Yep, you heard that right. No email, no social media, no work, nada. And guess what? The whole family joined me in this digital detox. Now I'll be honest, it wasn't 100% perfect. We did have some connectivity when we arrived in Mexico, and we could occasionally use the ship's Internet to check in on our dog with our house sitter and make sure everything was still okay back home. But the big difference was that we had our notifications off and weren't constantly drawn in by the day to day pull of social media, email, text messages, and all the things that typically grab our attention on our phones. But primarily for me, I. I intentionally did absolutely zero work for an entire week of my life. And it was astounding how much better I felt both during the trip and now that I've returned. If you're an entrepreneur like me, the word settle typically isn't in your vocabulary. There's this concept of never enough, where there's always something on your to do list, always something to optimize, always something you feel you should be doing. It's the complete polar opposite of the way you can show up as an employee. Taking paid time off, turning everything off, and truly disconnecting as hard as it was. And when I say hard, I mean really, really difficult I chose the latter, and I can't begin to tell you how freeing it felt to truly disconnect on a vacation and be completely present for what I believe is the first time in my adult life. That's right. I'm 43 now and I've had a business, a side hustle, an idea, clients and everything you can imagine since I was in high school. But for the last year I've been on a journey of finding joy, simplicity and what I love to do. Even just six months ago, the concept of completely disconnecting for an entire week would have been more weight than I could bear. There's zero chance I could have been at peace and truly present with my family. In fact, one of the biggest reasons I made so many changes in my professional career was because I caught myself thinking about my life in the future, asking myself that hard question, would I ever be able to truly disconnect if nothing changed? When that answer was a resounding no, I knew that was one more nail in the coffin for the reasons I decided to change everything again. But I have to tell you, the feeling of fully disconnecting as much as humanly possible was both eye opening for me as an entrepreneur and a very important gut check to how connected I choose to be on a day to day basis. So for this show, I want to share a few of the things that I did that gave me this bit of peace in the in hopes that it helps you disconnect and relax, the first thing I did was prepare. I knew about a month ago the trip was coming up. I asked myself the very firm, very simple can and should we be 100% disconnected from the Internet for the two and a half days while we were at sea? When thinking, can we? The answer is obviously yes. But when answering should we? I realized there were more no's than yeses for things like making sure we're available for our house sitter, watching for fraud alerts while we were in international waters, and since my wife and I both hold management positions, it made the most sense for us to have the option but exercise it rarely. So I decided to buy the Internet package for the ship, which naturally is very expensive, but rather than getting it for all four of our devices, I got it for one. We took turns rotating through our devices, but committed to only using it for what we needed to do. And that didn't include endless scrolling and posting on social media that could be reserved for when we were at port if we really had the need, as well as when we got home if the desire was still there. The second thing my wife and I did was the obvious, but not always the most exciting. We made time in our days, in the weeks leading up to being out of office, to get our shit together. This meant everything from writing down need to knows and emergency contact information for our house sitter, to recording video overviews of where projects and tasks are at and prepping our clients and contacts to make sure they knew we would be fully away and unavailable and that they would have coverage from someone else on our teams. The next thing I did is something that, hilariously enough, was way harder than it sounds. I intentionally reorganized all the settings on my phone to make it very difficult for me to have the need to check email, text messages, social media, Slack, finances, and just about everything else. I went through my settings and turned off nearly every notification possible. That's right, even text messages. I moved everything off of my home screen except for Spotify, my camera and photo apps and settings so I could toggle on and off roaming and wi fi, only leaving the necessities that I needed for this trip like maps and Uber for when we got to a port and when. I mean I cleared my home screen. I mean even the bottom row of persistent apps that we all keep the most used ones like text messages and email on. I wiped all of those off for the first time since I think I bought an iPhone where the operating systems supported arranging those, it was empty. Years back, Val and I went on the keto diet. We had no idea how addicted to sugar we were until we broke away from it. When I got on the boat, I realized that disconnecting was similar to breaking an addiction. It wouldn't be as easy as I thought. Even still, it was so freeing to step away. The best part of all of this was that as early as our first full day at sea, where we had no service and and I intentionally was not connected to the Internet, I felt like I regained a major percentage of my brain capacity. I didn't feel the need to check my phone and could leave it in a bag, my pocket, or even the room. A lot of times we think we're being present, but we couldn't be more wrong and lying to ourselves. Not only did I find myself rarely using what we paid for, the unexpected benefit of this exercise is that I realized I can operate at a much less connected level than I thought I could previously because because I've spent so much time automating my processes, implementing AI into my business, and having the right team to support me on the key Things that matter the most to me. Take it from someone who at one time had 14 salaried employees and a distributed team of 30 across seven time zones. It doesn't matter if you've got a huge staff or you're a one woman or one man. Show you're capable of disconnecting more than you think you can if you make the investment in yourself and start to optimize and automate just about everything you can one at a time. I'm recording this about a week after I've returned from my trip, and only three days ago did I actually put a few icons back on my home screen. It was interesting getting back to a standard workday where I found myself spending longer looking for those frequently used apps. And it was a really wonderful sign of where I could optimize yet again and reclaim some personal time and space. So my challenge for you is to take inventory of your tech addiction and ask yourself, how much time could you reclaim and how much more present could you be if you automated that next thing or delegated that one big, ominous task to a human or a robot? It's a seemingly insignificant question, but with an obvious and massive implication when it comes to your joy, your peace, and your most precious resource, your time. Research shows that a digital detox can significantly improve mental health, reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression, improving sleep quality, and reducing eye strain and headaches. On the flip side, technology addiction can lead to social isolation, poor concentration, and more. But the benefits of a digital detox are clear. Improved mental health, increased focus, and better relationships. This trip was an awesome digital free, all around wonderful vacation, but I wouldn't have been able to disconnect without the right tools. For entrepreneurs to be able to do this, automation and delegation are key. Using tools that automate tasks can help manage business while you're away, and effectively delegating to others ensures continuity. It's all about finding that balance and investing in yourself and your systems. Speaking of systems and AI automation, if you want to take advantage of AI with ease, my team at Bara Agency is supporting clients by tackling some big AI challenges and we're building a really incredible AI service right now. In fact, a large majority of my show is now being powered by it behind the scenes. So if you want to be part of this revolutionary movement in tech, now's the time to get in and get ahead before everyone else catches on. Reach out and let's automate your business using AI so that you too can comfortably disconnect. As always, I'm grateful to have you here, and I hope this episode has inspired you to consider your own relationship with technology and the power of disconnecting. Remember, just because you don't feel you can fully disconnect now, it doesn't mean it's not possible. It just takes that first step. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next episode of the Prompt.