Someone recently asked me, “Ian, why do you do this?”
Here’s why: because I am passionate about empowering others not just to reclaim their time, but to redeem it.
Our mission is to serve families and individuals by educating, equipping, and empowering them to build self-control around screen time and video gaming, to redeem the time for good works.
Today, I want to focus in on those last three words: “for good works.” What does that actually mean?
Coming up:
Why what we replace screen time with matters more than just reducing it
The impact of cigarette-like warnings on social media
The new “mystery book” that I’m about to start with my kids
Let’s get to it.
Don’t just reclaim your time. Redeem it.
When I think back on the 12+ hours a day I used to spend playing World of Warcraft, I don’t just think about what I was doing—I also think about everything I wasn’t doing.
In particular: I wasn’t investing in relationships with the people around me.
My goal with selfctrl was never just to help people get their time back from screens so they could go spend it on themselves in a different, less digital way. In other words, the goal was not to help people go from World of Warcraft to Sudoku.
It was to help people learn how to “redeem the time for good works.”
Now, when you hear the phrase “good works,” you might think about community service, helping old ladies across the street, or volunteering at a food drive. These are all great things. In fact, in his book Margin, Dr. Richard Swenson argues that this kind of service can have a significant positive impact on our own sense of well-being:
Medical studies reveal that service is health-enhancing. One of the best ways to heal your own emotional pain is to focus instead on meeting the needs of others… This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
But when I say “good works,” I’m not just talking about community service. I’m also talking about investing in relationships and vocational pursuits. I’m talking about all the ways we can convert time spent on ourselves into time spent making the world around us a better place.
We were made for something more
Here are just a few of the stories that I know of, from people who have decided to make significant changes in their lives. Stories like this are why I do what I do:
A dad with three kids was trying to finish his Master’s degree, but he was addicted to a game on his phone. He spent hours a day trying to level up in the game; meanwhile, his kids needed (and deserved) his attention, and the clock was ticking for him to complete his classwork. After engaging with selfctrl, he deleted the game off of his phone. He told me that by making that change, he was able to be fully present—for both his class, and for his kids—in a way he hadn’t for a long time.
A high schooler made a commitment to doing random acts of kindness for his mom—something I often call my live audiences into. Anytime he saw that his mom was stressed, instead of emotionally withdrawing, he tried to think through something he could do to make her day better. He told me later, “I actually feel like an awesome guy now.”
A guy in his early 20s graduated from a top college, but couldn’t get a job. He was also watching six hours of YouTube a day. He decided to that he wanted to redirect his YouTube time into more aggressively pursuing the job he wanted to get, which was working as a translator. After putting YouTube in its place, he found the job he was looking for.
A woman and her husband in retirement had gotten into the habit of sitting side-by-side on their phones for up to three hours at a time in the morning. After engaging with selfctrl, they both committed to calling friends and family during that time—using the time to connect with others instead of only connecting with their devices.
After taking intentional steps with technology, lots of other young people have told me some version of the following: “I’m no longer in a black hole. I was totally lost, I was completely depressed, and getting off of this game, or this specific type of media—I can’t ever go back there.”
But again: the goal isn’t just to help people reduce their media consumption for its own sake.
The goal is to make time for relationships, kindness, community, vocational pursuits, and service. Ultimately, selfctrl is about becoming the sort of people who leave the world better than we found it.
A few stories that caught my eye this week.
A study published in JAMA Health Forum showed Gen Zers messages about how social media can cause addiction, sleep disruption, and mental health issues—and then asked them to anticipate whether they would be likely to use social media less. Many said yes. These sorts of health warnings could be a helpful deterrent—but wouldn’t replace the need for us to have intentional conversation about social media’s potential harms.
Another study based out of Finland found that “repetitive, short-duration use of devices” (think picking up your phone, quickly flicking through three or four apps, and then putting it back down) was more connected with mental fatigue and the experience of “information overload” than longer-duration screen time sessions. I don’t think this means that uninterrupted screen time is therefore automatically ideal; but the repetitive task-switching involved here clearly takes a unique toll on the brain.
An engineer at the AI company Anthropic resigned this week, citing concerns that “neither [Anthropic nor OpenAI] are acting responsibly” and that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” It’s hard to know what to do with statements like these, and my goal is never to scaremonger, but it is important to stay aware of what people on the inside of these companies are saying.
I bought a new book to read with my kids after we finish The Hobbit.
They’re super excited and can’t stop asking me what the book is, but I’m not telling them—and I’m not telling you either.
All I’ll say is that it’s a “mystery book.” Any guesses as to what it might be? 😉 Or, any books you think I should be reading with them?
Gif by boomerangtoons on Giphy
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