You know when you’re having coffee with a friend, your phone is sitting face up on the table, you’re in the middle of deep conversation and suddenly, your phone lights up with a notification?  You can’t help but break your glance from your friend’s eyes to that little, life-giving device, only to see that it’s just a text from a retailer with some pun about leggings, or a traffic alert, or HEY, someone has invited you to play Candy Crush with them…and you’ve totally lost focus on what your friend was saying.

I’ve noticed more and more how easily distracted I get. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s my personality, or my intense FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”), but I’ll be typing out an email or a blog, for instance, and my phone will light up. I stop everything I’m doing to see what it is, and I’ll lose all train of thought over something that likely had no immediate significance in my life, like ‘handbags my wallet will love,’ or, ‘sale-yeah on these handbags,’ and let’s not forget about that desperate Prince in the Middle East who needs that wire RIGHT AWAY.

…and before long, texts were going unanswered, my little ‘red notifications’ started to climb into the thousands, and life just felt like a jumbled mess of noise that I just couldn’t keep up with or hear myself over.

So, that thing that lights up your phone in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a thought, in the middle of the night, is called a ‘push notification.’  It shows up on your home screen and gives you that sense of urgency to read or respond, RIGHT NOW.

Guess what? YOU have control over what information you see on your phone and what’s most important to YOU.

About a year ago I took all text, email and social media notifications off of my home screen.  Now, I can only read texts and emails and respond to those Instagram comments when I intend to.

Doing this has helped me to stay focused on conversations and tasks I’m trying to get done, AND it helps with responding to messages sooner, more efficiently, and with a state of mind that is present in the moment.

How many of us have read a text on our home screen in passing, mentally answered it, and then totally forgot about it once the next notification comes in? HELLO.

When we’re intentional with our time and tasks, even answering the text about next week’s meeting time, life gets more peaceful.

In addition to all but taking email off my phone completely, I have totally simplified the way I receive messages. The absolute #1 helper has been a free program called Unroll.me.  They don’t pay me for talking about them, I just think their service is SUPER cool.

What happens is, you give the program your email and it scans your inbox for subscriptions; you know, all those retailers with DAILY sales and promotions.

UnRoll.me puts all those retail, beauty, and emails from your Congressman (who, by the way, is NOT asking for an immediate wire into his bank account…well, not really anyway) into a list and asks you which one(s) you want to “roll up.” Then, after you’ve made your selections, it combines all of those promotions into ONE email that they send you once per day.

It has been a life saver, and has even helped me realize which email lists I just don’t need to be on. It has taught me that I can simply tell the nice lady at the register, ‘No thank you,’ when she asks for my email again.  We’ll talk about how refreshing and helpful the word ‘no’ can be another time, though.

I loooove social media.  I love seeing what people are up to, how cute their kids are, and on a good day it quenches my serious, aforementioned “FOMO.”

But social media has a tendency to try to tell us who we are or who we should be. It usually only tells part of the story and if we’re not careful we can let segments of other people’s stories, or their “highlight reel,” tell us what life should look like for us.

How often do we mindlessly reach for the phone and scroll, scroll, scroll through that social media feed before we’ve even had a thought of our own? I’m not going to get all meditation experience on you, but I will say that YOU have the opportunity to decide how your day is going to go. Whether you realize it or not, the moment you reach for that Facebook feed or Instagram story, you’re inviting someone else to weigh in on your day.

I am EMBARRASSED to say that I’ve felt left out, I’ve felt like my house wasn’t decorated well enough, that I wasn’t working hard enough, and that my Instagram wasn’t cohesive enough…and that I wasn’t “enough…” all before my feet have hit the floor some mornings.

I’ve laid in bed with my husband beside me and ready to cuddle me, and I’ve just scrolled, scrolled, scrolled, wishing that my day had looked as good as my Instagram girl-crushes, and gone to sleep thinking about how I could craft a caption good enough to get 100 more followers tomorrow instead of being grateful that I went to bed with a full stomach and a hot, rich husband with his arm around me … and my phone.  Yikes.

So, in an attempt to lessen this addiction to information and filtered photos and feeling like I’m not enough before I’ve even wiped the mascara boogers out of my eyes, I refuse to check social media right before I go to bed, and it’s not the first thing I do when I wake up anymore.  It has really made a difference in my peace of mind and how I am influenced every day.

We have so many simple opportunities to be more present and feel at peace, and I invite you to try these things.  I always love to hear your feedback, so tell me if you’re implementing any of these and how you’ve made them your own!