Tag: More like the father

December 10, 2018

Christmas Survival Tips

Does it feel like Christmas is bearing down on you like a freight train? On top of the gift buying, party planning and house decorating, Christmas becomes that monumental deadline when all those odd jobs around the house need to be completed because there’s no way we’re carrying any items on that ‘To Do’ list forward to another calendar year.

To help take a little stress out of your Christmas prep, here’s my list of five (light-hearted) ‘must haves’:

Wire cutters, bolt cutters and angle grinder – with these three grades of cutting implements, you will be ready for every eventuality. Nothing just comes in a box any more. Everything from Barbie dolls to remote control cars, power tools to kitchen appliances all come with enough cable ties and fixing points so that the item can withstand a Category 5 cyclone. We all know that the kitchen scissors are never up to the task (ever tried to remove a new pair of kitchen scissors out of their secure packaging? You need a really good pair of scissors, but…).

Batteries – you can’t have too many. We’ve all been caught out Christmas morning with the toy or device that takes a few dozen batteries (plus some for the remote), and they are always the type you don’t have in the house. Stock up and buy several dozen of every battery size and you can’t go wrong. We’ve already stocked up, so if you are having trouble finding batteries in North Western Sydney…apologies.

Night vision goggles – the bags of rubbish at the end of Christmas Day are astounding; there is always more material that will actually fit in your bins. My tip is, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, casually start asking neighbours if they’ll be away over the Christmas/New Year period. If so, offer to put out and bring in their bins – any additional capacity in their bins is yours for the taking. If they say, ‘no need, they’ll be empty’, that’s a bonus. If you can’t find a neighbour with capacity, this is where the goggles come in – garbage night bin raids. While one of those strap-on head torches would also do an adequate job when you’re checking in bins for capacity while both hands are full, nothing trumps night vision goggles if you want to go completely undetected by the neighbours.

Carbon Offset credits – following on from the previous point, even the biggest environmental sceptic will inevitably get a twinge of guilt over all those bags of present packaging, plastic plates, cups, cutlery, tablecloths (not mention the leftover food) going to landfill. You’ll sleep much easier Christmas night if you’ve purchased some carbon offset credits in advance, or at the very least, a dozen trees from the local nursery. What could be more fun than gathering family and friends to plant trees on Boxing Day?

Smart Phone Translator App – have you noticed that the instruction booklet that comes with that latest toy/gadget has about 50 pages and only 2 of those pages are in English? What’s more, they usually tell you little more than where to find the on/off switch. My theory is that some other people group/s must be receiving significantly more information in their language. So, when you need something more complex than on/off, the translator app will be invaluable (it may also come in handy to understand what that guy a few doors down is yelling at you when he catches you looking through his bins on garbage night).

Follow these five simple tips, and I guarantee this year will be your least stressful Christmas ever.

(Lastly, if you haven’t bought that stocking stuffer yet, check out my latest book, ‘More Like the Father‘. A great gift for the Father’s in your world).

November 5, 2018

Screen Time, Digital Wellbeing & Priorities

New technology releases have a habit of introducing a bunch of new, ‘must have’ functions that are solutions to problems we never knew we had. However, Apple’s latest mobile operating system – iOS 12 has an interesting new function called Screen Time.

Where a lot of new apps on our devices sap more of our precious time, Screen Time’s purpose, according to Apple, is “to help customers reduce interruptions and manage screen time for themselves and their families.”

There is an Android equivalent – Digital Wellbeing, which is currently in beta testing for Pixel phone owners only, and is expected to be released more widely late 2018.

How Screen Time Works

Screen Time provides the user with a few simple graphs showing how you used your device today and the past week. It gives stats on how many times you picked up your device, the amount of time spent on the device, and a detailed breakdown of which apps you used the most and how many notifications you received from the various apps.

Healthy Boundaries

Another great function within Screen Time is the parental controls that enable you to set limits for how much screen time your children have on their devices. Outside of the agreed time, certain apps cannot be accessed, with the icon appearing grey.

The child can request an extension, which can be useful if they need a little extra time on the internet to work on a school project. I think Screen Time is an excellent tool for starting a conversation with our children about setting healthy boundaries around screen usage.

That’s always been the challenge – as much as our devices enhance our lives (remember how long it used to take to plan a trip on public transport involving several modes of transportation?) they can also be a huge distraction, incredible time wasters.

Revealing Your Busyness

What I love about Screen Time & Digital Wellbeing is that, until now, we’ve not had a good picture of how much time we spend on our devices. We all like to think we’re busy but busy doing what?

A few weeks ago I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 12; the set up gives the option to amalgamate the results for both devices so that I see a consolidated report for mobile device usage. Now with three weeks of data, I’m starting to see a picture of my screen time….

My Personal Screen Time

Daily Usage

On an average day, I pick up my phone or iPad 31 times and use them for a total of 2hours 18mins

Most Used Apps

1. Noteshelf, is a note-taking, document markup app. No surprise this is my most used app. In a bid to be paperless, I use this app with the Apple pencil as my virtual notebook
2. Safari – my default web browser. I do much research for my job and when writing, so again, no surprises here
3. Domain (real estate search) and Car Sales (new car reviews and vehicles for sale) – this was the big ‘ah-ha’ moment for me. I spend 1h 30m on each of these apps each week. When sharing my Screen Time results with a friend, they asked if I was buying a new car or thinking about moving house. Neither of those is true; I love looking at cars and houses.

Screen Time Reflects Your Priorities

I’m not necessarily saying we need to give up the things we love, but it does challenge us when we say we didn’t have time to hang out with the kids or take my wife on a date this week, but I found 3 hours to look at stuff I have no intention of buying. Screen Time reflects my priorities to me.

Disrupted by Notifications?

I receive 22 notifications a day, primarily from Facebook Messenger and text messages. This might not sound like much, but research tells us that it takes an average of 23mins to return to the original task after a disruption. I think that seems a little overstated, but even if the disruption is half that number, that’s a lot of wasted time.

So I’ve turned off notifications for some of the apps and will only check them at particular times throughout the day to see if that makes a difference to my productivity.

Technology Should Improve Life

As the tagline for Digital Wellbeing says, “Great technology should improve life, not distract from it”. For too long that’s not been the case. With Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing, we have two tools that challenge us to consider how much of our lives we devote to our devices. What we do with that information is up to each of us.

If you’ve had your ah-ha moment when looking at your screen time stats, I’d love to hear from you – particularly what changes you’ve made to how you use your devices.

 

 

October 25, 2018

We Condone What We’re Silent On

‘Boys will be boys’- we’ve all said it, but this little phrase can have two very different meanings. On the positive side, it can be an acknowledgement or celebration of those attributes that make boys wonderfully unique. For example, countless studies are showing that boys are ‘wired’ to be risk takers. So when Mister Ten leaps off the garage roof to see if he can fly, we chuckle and say, ‘boys will be boys’.

However, the Australian Government’s recent ‘boys will be boys’ advertising campaign exposes a very different meaning to the phrase. The ads put the spotlight on those offhand comments that excuse unacceptable behaviours and mindsets that have become entrenched in our culture over generations.

If you haven’t seen the ads, a father pulls up at school to pick up his teenage son who explains that he, “got detention, just for flicking up a girls skirt”. The dad smiles at his son and asks, “that’s it?”. A primary school aged younger brother is sitting in the back seat, and without looking up from his device says, “doesn’t she know that’s just boys being boys?”. His primary school aged sister responds with a degree of resignation, “I’ve already accepted that as I grow up, I’ll probably be harassed and even abused”. The father, realising the weight of the message he just conveyed to his daughter, says, “Sorry, that’s not what I meant”.

A colleague of mine some years ago had two teenage sons; whenever they were acting up or giving their mother a hard time, my colleague would tell them they needed to find a girl and ‘get laid’. Interesting that this was never the remedy for his daughter, but what message would she have heard from this ‘prescription’ for her brothers? Perhaps that girls are just objects for helping boys relieve their hormonal frustration? The fact that he didn’t want his daughter to be one of those ‘objects’ is fine, but I’m sure the double standards were not lost on her.

The almost daily unfolding of yet another Weinstein/#metoo story plus the fact that (as I write this) in the last seven days another six women died in our nation in domestic violence cases, tells me we have a big problem. Of course, not all disrespect ends with domestic violence, but as the Government’s Minister for Women points out, “the cycle of violence certainly starts with disrespect.”

It’s great that the Government is focusing on the issue and has made an investment in confronting the issue of disrespect towards women through these ads (although this $160m campaign is only 0.45% of the annual counter-terrorism budget of $35B). However, nothing changes at a societal level unless we as individuals change, take ownership, and make changes in our world.

As dads, we have a particularly important part to play. We need to be careful that there is nothing in our words or actions that convey disrespect towards women. It can start with something as simple as the rolling of the eyes and muttering ‘woman driver’ under our breath when someone cuts us off in the traffic. We need to ensure that we don’t have double standards – one set of rules for boys, another set of rules for the girls.

I also think it’s true that what we’re silent on, we condone. When you’re with a bunch of guys and one of them tells stories making fun of his wife, do we laugh awkwardly, pretend they didn’t say anything or do we tell them ‘that’s not OK’?

What do we do when we’re in a clothing store, and they’re playing hip-hop music with misogynous, demeaning lyrics? Do we roll our eyes or have a word with the store manager? I can tell you we’ve spoken to the sales staff before, and it doesn’t always go well. However, if we’re going to see change, it starts with all of us; unless we do something, the negative cycle of disrespect gets passed down to another generation, and we sit back bemoaning ‘what’s happening to our society?’.