Monday, July 08, 2013

Tips for kicking the Candy Crush addiction

When Nathan woke me up before 5:30am, I was actually almost looking forward to getting up and blogging this morning.  I think progress is being made in the right direction here.

So I thought I'd let you know some of the strategies I'm using to help myself get through my Candy Crush addiction and engage with my world.

1 - Plan my mornings.  What this looks like for me: either at night as I'm falling asleep (which takes me a ridiculous amount of time even though I'm exhausted) or first thing in the morning after Nathan wakes me up and I lay there praying for him to fall back asleep, I think to myself, "What am I going to do this morning?"
 And the answer isn't allowed to be, "I'm going to sit and play Candy Crush until the kids scream at me because they want breakfast."  I tell myself that I'm going to sit in the kitchen with my laptop and read some blogs.  Sometimes I think about what post I might write that morning.  And I remember that every day starts with coffee.  Precious, precious coffee.  It's time to buy another package of the flavoured stuff to give myself that added bonus of an extra good cup.

2 - I deleted all my extra lives in Candy Crush.  See, Candy Crush has this thing where you need lives to play a level.  If you don't beat the level, you lose a life.  But you're limited to five lives, and then you don't get more for a set amount of time.  I think it's something like half an hour to the next new life.  But you can give your friends lives when you connect to Facebook.  I had collected quite a few - as in, like, 40 spare lives waiting to be claimed.  Which meant that I could play any time I wanted, and I wasn't limited by not having any lives to use.  Well, I deleted my extra lives, so I'm back to being limited to five lives at a time.

3 - I made a list of all the OTHER things I can do with my time.  Normal things like cleaning and gardening and actually putting the laundry away instead of just leaving it clean and folded in the basket.  The point is that when I'm feeling bored and wanting to escape, I can go to my list and find something productive to do instead of just turning to my phone.

Those are the three main things I've been doing in my attempt to spend less time on my phone.  So far, so good.  I've got a couple more ideas for blog posts to come, so hopefully this new morning routine will allow that to continue as well.  For now, I haven't had my coffee yet, so I'm off to go pour a cup before I try to say too much more, and it comes out completely incomprehensible because my brain isn't completely awake yet.

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