Show notes:

Are you addicted to your phone? I think as wedding business owners we all fall into this category – but it’s time to take back control! We don’t need our phones to have all the power – so today I’m sharing some tips about how I am trying to slowly shift my phone addiction!

It’s not easy – but putting down the phone will definitely help claw back some much needed time!

Need some time to totally unwind and relax? Listen to the relaxation session in episode 17.

Want to outsource? Visit the Wedding Pro Agency website for pricing and details.

Transcript:

Becca: Are you addicted to your phone? If I was to have a look at your screen time report, would you be embarrassed or would you be pleased that you haven’t used your phone as often as maybe I have? Do you know what? I got so embarrassed about my screen time. I turned the feature off. As business owners, we can be totally absorbed in our devices and we can waste so much time, and we give away so much of our attention. So today I’m gonna be talking about how we take a step back and put the phone.

I am Becca Pountney wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you are listening to The Wedding Pros who are Ready to Grow podcast. I’m here to share with you actionable tips, strategies, and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get going with today’s episode. As we dive into this topic, I want you to know there is absolutely no judgment.

I’m not here to make you feel bad. I use my phone as much as anyone else does, but I also know deep down that it’s not what I wanna be doing, and I’m always looking for ways to try and back away from my phone and get back with it into real life. So I just wanted to share very honestly some of the tips that I’ve tried in the past and some of the things I do to try and stop myself being totally absorbed and addicted to my phone, I really think it’s a pitfall that we fall into as entrepreneurs.

We’re always striving to do more post more content, get back to inquiries quicker, and it can mean that we’re totally addicted to our phone, but sometimes we do need to set better boundaries. So I’m gonna be sharing with you a bunch of ideas that I’ve tried myself that help me be less addicted to my phone.

Do you schedule your social media posts?

So first of all, number one is scheduling your social media posts ahead. Now, sometimes I find this hard to do, but when I do get ahead and schedule social media posts ahead of time, it does mean that I’m not on my phone as much. I’m not thinking every day I need to go onto Instagram, I need to go onto Facebook. I need to post some content because it’s already done this way.

I’m not doing it in the moment either. I can sit down at the start of a month and I can plan out and post a whole month’s worth of content onto my grids, and it’s gonna. Away so much of that scrolling time that I do in the week. So why not think about whether you could go ahead and schedule your posts for the rest of the month rather than just being there.

Every now and again, you go ahead and actually schedule them all at once. This will save you so much time. You can use something like Meta Business Suite to do this, and if you use some kind of template, like once a week, you’re gonna post a sales post. Once a week you’re gonna post a testimonial. All of a sudden this is a lot easier.

Have a social media check in

The second tip I have for you is to create certain social media check-in times. If you’re anything like me, you find yourself checking your Facebook and Instagram multiple times a day and often right in the middle of tasks, and it really is not a productive way to be during the working day. It can be really helpful to set yourself certain times when you’re going to check your social media.

So, for example, you could say, I’m gonna check my social posts just before the day starts, before I get into my work. Then during my lunch break, I’m gonna do another check-in before or maybe after lunch. And then at the end of the day, before I finish work, I’m gonna do it again. Now, I know this feels a bit contrived and it’s hard to stick to, but when we know that we’ve got certain times to check in on our social media, we don’t need to be doing it every five minutes. And let’s be honest, nothing is updated that frequently.

Use Do Not Disturb

The third thing I do when I’ve got a particularly big piece of work or a tight deadline, is to just put my phone on do not disturb. Something as simple as that allows me to continue listening to music or listening to a podcast, but actually get on with my work without being distracted by notifications, by pings or by me just picking up my phone and going onto social media.

I often do this while I’m recording a podcast, doing a live video or just doing a really heavy piece of work, and it is really simple, but really effective because you’re not impacted by those distractions. Talking about notifications, I’ve actually turned my notifications off on both Instagram and Facebook.

I was finding I was getting pings every five seconds with people posting, commenting, liking, sharing, or doing something on one of my social media posts, and it was driving me crazy. Since I’ve turned notifications off, it’s really impacted the way I’m distracted. If I don’t know the notifications there, I don’t have that same urge to go in and check it straight away.

There is something that happens in our brain when we’re told something’s happened, but we can’t see it without going into the app, which forces us to go in. But when we don’t know, we don’t have that same urge or desire. So I. Urge you all actually to go ahead and turn off the notifications on your Facebook and Instagram. You can go in at those check-in points. You can go in regular points of the day to go and have a look at what’s there, but you don’t need to be interrupted frequently when you’re busy doing something else.

Leave Facebook groups

The fourth thing I wanna urge you to do is particularly in regards to Facebook and that’s to leave any unnecessary groups. I recently had a look at the list of groups that I am in on Facebook, and it is vast. I mean, some of them have been out of date for years and years and years, but quite frankly, we often don’t leave Facebook groups. Now since the invention of this new at everyone feature, I’ve become aware of groups that I’d forgotten I was part of.

And sometimes I get fed up of getting notification after notification after notification of being tagged in these various groups. Now, I know as a group owner that the at everyone tag can be really useful for getting your content in front of people, but is also a good reminder to you of the groups you don’t need to be in if you are getting tagged in post left, right, and center.

For a group that is no longer relevant to you or you don’t really enjoy being part of, then why not free yourself and leave that Facebook group? It’s gonna mean you’re gonna get a lot less notifications. And instead of getting annoyed about the everyone button, instead just do the right thing. Leave the group.

If it’s annoying you, you probably don’t wanna be in the group in the first place and well, Yeah, we don’t need to be in that many Facebook groups, quite frankly, and have a look at some of them that you are in. I bet you’re in some that are really old. I’m still in some Facebook groups from when I was at university where we were planning our projects. That’s just ridiculous.

Outsource.

Okay. The fifth thing that you can do if you really wanna have a breakaway from your phone, or if you’re fed up of constantly being on Facebook and Instagram is to outsource your social media posting. When I outsource to one of my team members, the posting for Vicinity Weddings, this was a massive wake up call to me because not only did I have to not worry about scheduling it, I didn’t have to worry about it at all.

And those posts go out without me even thinking about it. So I’m constantly showing up as vicinity weddings, but I never even. At the account, or hardly ever because someone else is doing it on my behalf. And that is so freeing. So if you’ve got the resources and the budget, why not consider outsourcing your social media posting to somebody else?

Maybe talk to me at the Wedding Pro Agency. We can post for you five times a week on your Facebook and Instagram grid for a really affordable rate with one of my team members. And therefore, your content is going out regularly. You’re showing up every single day, five days a week without actually ever having to.

On in the app. The other thing is you can check those scheduled posts in Meta Business Suite, so you don’t even have to go onto Facebook and Instagram to check what the posts look like. Yes, you need to go in occasionally to reply to any comments or reply to any messages, but if you’ve got even more budget, you could even pay someone to do that as well. If you want more details about the Wedding Pro Agency, all of the links are in the show notes. That outsourcing really is worth the money cuz it takes that stress away and it means you’re not as constantly on social media as you were.

The next thing that I wanna talk about when it comes to our phone isn’t so much about social media, but about email.

Have email boundaries

I think so often we feel like we need to be able to get back to our couples instantly. Couples contact us all times of day and all times of night. And we feel this pressure to reply, well actually, we don’t need to be on call 24 hours a day. We’re not on call paramedics. It’s not life and death. And yes, we wanna respond to people quickly, but we do need to set our own boundaries.

And it’s important to make those boundaries clear to our couple. So, for example, if a couple that has already booked you when they first meet with you, once they first sign your contract, you can explain to them your working hours. Say, I’ll be contactable between this hour and this hour. If you have a question outside of those times, feel free to send it to me, but you won’t get a reply until the next morning.

When we set out our boundaries, people are more likely to respect them. However, if we don’t have any boundaries, people feel like they can contact us day and night, we start replying and then they carry on doing it. You know that saying, give them an inch and they’ll run a mile. Well, that’s exactly what our couples do.

And it’s the same with inquiries. Someone might inquire at 11 o’clock at night, but that doesn’t mean you need to reply to them at 11 o’clock at night. Reply to them first thing the next morning. Once it’s within your sociable working hours. Don’t feel like you need to be everything to everyone all times of day and night. The evenings and the weekends maybe set aside to do something with your family, so don’t take that time away from them because you are on your.

Hide your phone

Okay, now the next tip is something that I do all of the time, and it’s kind of quite ridiculous, quite honestly, that we have to go to this length to get some time.

Now, I, as I said, I’m definitely not judging you because I struggle with using my phone too much all of the time. So sometimes what I do, if I wanna spend an evening on the sofa, chilling out, relaxing, watching tv, watching a film, being with my family, playing board games, all of those things, I will actually leave my phone in a cupboard upstairs.

Yes. That is the length I’m going to, because even if I have the phone in the room, the urges to go and look at it, as soon as someone leaves to go to the toilet or there’s a breaking conversation. Everything within me wants to go and look at that phone, which is scary. So if I leave it outta sight out of mind, up in a room upstairs, I don’t have that same temptation.

And soon I get absorbed into whatever it is that I’m doing and I don’t even think about it. And then when I’m ready to go and look at it again, I can go ahead and do that. So perhaps for you, that’s all you need to do when you’ll need to watch a film or spend some time with family or, or focus on something. Literally physically put your phone in another room in a cupboard and leave it there. I know it’s simple, but it really does make all of the diffference.

Now my final tip is something that me and my friend have been doing a little bit together, especially when we are together in a certain place, and that is having a phone detox time.

Have a digital detox

Now, this is where people kind of do what I said about switching your phone off and putting in a cupboard, but you do it together. So a couple of months ago, me and my friend went out for lunch and we’re both business owners and it was during the day and we had some lunch together and a bit of time together.

and we are constantly bombarded with emails and messages, and one of us is replying to something and we realize that we’re not present for each other. And actually when we decided let’s have a bit of a digital detox time, we said to each other, right? We’re gonna sit here for five minutes and just look through our messages and reply to any emails or anything that we’ve got that we’ve seen now.

And then we’re both going to switch off our phones, put them in our bags and not touch them again until a certain time. We agreed a time. And then at that time, we both turned on our phones just to check that there hadn’t been any emergency calls from the school or anything like that. And then we turned them back off again and did another couple of hours.

It was really. Freeing to do this. I love that we did it together because we’re accountable. It meant that when we were together, we were able to really be together and have a good conversation and not be distracted. We don’t realize how distracted we are by our own phones until we see someone else doing it.

Do any of you ever have those friends or family members where you are in the middle of a conversation and suddenly you realize they checked out because they’re looking at their phone or something’s distracted them on their screen, or they’ve even picked up their phone and started replying to a message and they’re no longer listening to what you have to.

It can feel so rude. Yeah. I guarantee you’ve probably done the same thing to someone else. Cause we don’t realize it. So having a digital detox during a meeting, turning your phone off, putting it in your bag, and agreeing right during this conversation, we’re not gonna have any phones or during this day out as a family, we’re not gonna have any phones.

We’re just gonna check at lunchtime for an emergency is a great thing to. . If you’ve got any of your own tips and ideas about how you have stopped using your phone quite so frequently and how you are trying to break the addiction, I would love to hear from you. As I said, this is an open conversation.

I’m just sharing some of the things that I found helpful in my own life to try and be less addicted to my phone because I know it’s a struggle. As small business owners, technology is great because we can be everywhere. Anywhere in the world, and we can contact people left, right, and center, but sometimes it is also damaging.

Do you have any other tips?

So any tips to make this better and more healthy for us are always greatly received. If you’ve got any, why not drop me an email? Becca at beccapountney.com. Drop me a direct message on Instagram and let me know what your tips are there. If you send me some good ones, maybe I’ll even share them in a future podcast episode.

I’ll see you next week. Now, put your phone down.