The average American spends 4 hours on TV, 1 hour 35 minutes on social media, and 102 minutes on radio daily—over 65 work weeks a year. One person cut social media to 30 minutes, ditched radio, and filled the gap with audiobooks instead, reading about 50 books yearly.
Look at 2020. I want you to really challenge anything that you've done that's status quo. I'm going to give you some stats around a handful of things here that are extremely status quo when it comes to American culture and just culture in general. Okay, let's just start with a stat here. The average American spends 3 hours and 58 minutes on TV every day. Okay, so let's just— it's 2 minutes shy of 4 hours. Okay, let me just make that statement because it actually hurts my brain to think about this. The average American spends almost 4 hours on TV every day. Okay, here's another statistical data point that's actually going to jump out at you. The average time that we spend on social media is an hour and 35 minutes. Okay, so let's just— we're going to start combining this. Now we're at 4 hours on TV, we'll just round it down to an hour and a half on social media. We're at 5 and a half hours per day between TV and social media. How about this? The average person spends 102 minutes per day On radio. Okay, like, is that— that's just kind of, again, another huge data set that's just leaping out at me. We're spending 135 minutes on social, we're spending 3 hours and 58 minutes on TV, and we're spending 102 minutes a day on radio. I took the time to just kind of multiply those things out. What does that look like over the course of a year? Get this. Okay, on TV, we're spending 1,460 hours Okay, or let's just quantify that differently. If you are working a 40-hour work week, you're spending 36.5 work weeks on TV. If you're averaging an hour and a half on social media, that's 547 hours a year or 13.68 work weeks. If you're investing 102 minutes a day into radio, which by the way, 97% of Americans say they listen to the radio on their commute, Okay, and a lot of that data point just comes in the commute because the average commute is 45 minutes one way in the United States. So that information makes complete sense to me. But that's 620.5 hours per year or 15.5 work weeks. Okay, so if we compiled all of that, we're actually investing more time in radio, social media, and TV than we actually are investing in the things that we do. In our careers. It's actually over 65 extra work weeks that we could get back if we eliminated those. Now, that's an overstatement, okay? And I'm trying to make a really big point here. So the overstatement, I get the fact that, you know, no one's going to reduce their TV time to zero, or it would be almost no one, because they might watch, you know, a show per week with, with a friend, or they might have a A show that they love, one show they love on Netflix that they watch, you know, an hour here or there. I get that. Social media, look, I believe in having a strong leadership brand on social media. So I've got to be intentional with that time, but I am not going to spend an hour and 35 minutes a day. In fact, I limit my time on social to 30 minutes a day. On radio, I eliminate that completely. There's no time on radio that I would spend on radio. I want to give you some ideas around this to just say, What if 2020 is a year where you become Rick Barry-ish in a couple of places? You become a little bit weird. If you get really intentional with your time in this, let's just talk about some ways that you can utilize that time. First of all, you don't have to listen to music in the car. I love what Brian Tracy said back in the '80s. He called radio bubblegum for the ears. Look, with audiobooks today, if you use Audible or whatever, Kindle or whatever app you use, if you're taking in podcasts— the average book that I read is some I listen to. I say read, that's not actually true. I listen to about probably 95% to 98% of all the books that I take in today. But if there's 620 hours that I can capture by not listening to the radio, My average book is somewhere around 6 hours long. I could digest 100 books in a year. Now, I don't digest 100 books in a year, but I digest north of 50. A lot of people say, I don't understand how you do it. Well, it's because I'm being more intentional with my time. I'm saying no to things that don't matter to say yes to things that actually do matter, to things that actually allow me to grow and to become more.
