In this solo episode, Kelly Alhooie addresses the pervasive habit of mindlessly scrolling on smartphones first thing in the morning and its impact on productivity, family life, and professional practice. She identifies the pattern of automatic phone checking as a time‑sucking loop and shares four concrete tactics to break it: (1) physically relocate the phone (e.g., keep it downstairs) so it cannot be accessed until a purposeful task like a gym visit is completed; (2) remove social‑media apps from the phone entirely and access them only via a desktop, forcing a deliberate action; (3) conduct a personal time audit to quantify how many minutes are lost to scrolling and re‑frame that time toward revenue‑generating or self‑care activities; and (4) use the gym as a reward mechanism, pairing a secondary “music‑only” phone with the workout so the primary phone becomes a post‑exercise treat. Throughout, Kelly blends personal anecdotes with client observations, emphasizing that everyone has the same 24‑hour day and that mindful restructuring of phone habits can reclaim valuable time for work, family, and self‑nourishment.
Chapters
All right, let's talk about patterns that do not serve you anymore and how to actually break free from them. So welcome to today's episode. As some of you probably do every morning, you're probably like me if I had to take a guess. You, when you wake up, you grab your phone, go to social media, and start scrolling. Well, here's the thing. 15 minutes go by, 30 minutes go by, 45 minutes go by. And all of a sudden you are late to work, kids are running around the house everywhere, and you're just like scrambling to get things done. So here's the first pattern that I believe most people need to break free from, and I've come up with a little bit of strategies because I've had this addiction problem myself. Um, number one, I put my phone like downstairs. If I sleep upstairs, I put my phone downstairs So I don't have access to it until I go and do a task that I need to do, meaning until I go to the gym, then my reward is I get to touch my phone. Like, seriously. So I'll go to the gym and I do have multiple phones. So this may— I mean, you could do this, but some of you guys, maybe harder than not. So my real phone, I will keep down here, go to the gym with my fake phone. That just has like music on it, and then I come back and I can grab my phone. That's one strategy. The other strategy is literally having the willpower not to scroll and taking off Instagram, Facebook, all the things off your cell phone completely. And the only way you can access it is through your desktop, so that you have to physically go in there and actually do a task and schedule it through like Meta business suites, and that's the only way. Like, seriously, that might be a thing you have to do, because what I hear from most of my clients is like, Kelly, I don't have time, I don't have time. But the reality is we all have 24 hours in a day, every single one of us. Some people utilize them the most, and some people don't utilize them as much as they should. And I have found the things that are time suckers is actually scrolling on Instagram or Facebook or wherever they want to scroll. TikTok, learning, whatever. Okay, take it off your phone. Take it off your phone. This is the first pattern that you're gonna have to break. Like, literally, when I realized that I even just switched up my, um, my Instagram and Facebook on my phone, my finger— it's crazy— my finger would literally go to where the Facebook button or the Instagram button would be that's now not there and it would want to hit it because that's how trained my brain is to just go, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. And whether or not y'all realize it or not, you have a pattern that you do on your phone. You will literally go Facebook, Instagram, email, this email, go HighLevel. Well, like, you will literally go through the Slack. Like, your hand just goes through the motion of it to just check that everything's done. Isn't that crazy? Like, the technology is getting us. Like, it's really getting us. And so you just have to be mindful of that. It's like, where is your time going? So the number one thing I do is I do an audit. I just audit my time and audit myself. Okay, so I woke up 5 o'clock. I woke up. Okay, then what'd I do? Well, I woke up at 5, but I didn't get out of bed until 6 o'clock. Okay, well, there's an hour right there. What the heck did I do during that time period? Oh, So I was scrolling. Okay, well, clearly I could get an hour back of my time if I just didn't scroll. Wow. You know what I could do in that hour to make money? You know what I can do in that hour to give back to my clients? You know what I can do in that hour to nourish myself? Wow. Okay. Which is why I put my phone out here and go to the gym, because that's self-nourishing. Okay.
