I don’t know what your business is, but can you set ‘work hours’ where you can use your phone to check in and do what you need to for work? Truly, people do not need an instant response to anything. Their messages can sit there for half a day or a day even.
When it is NOT work hours, the phone gets put on a different floor of the house than where you are at doing school or spending time with your family, preferably turned off. Because, again, very little really needs taken care of right away. People can always leave a message.
An example:
If your work hours are from 1pm-2pm, and 6pm-7pm, then at 7pm each evening you shut down your phone and put it in a drawer upstairs (or closet). In the morning, wake up and enjoy your kids. Do your learning and school work together. Cook. Read a good book aloud. Serve someone. Play a game with the kids. Go outside and enjoy nature, go for a walk.
At 1pm let your kids know you’re going to do work until 2pm. Set an alarm for 1:55pm. Sit in a quiet place and work until the alarm goes off. Then shut down the phone and put it away again. Go back and be with your family. (Extra accountability – tell the kids what activity you will do together at 2pm when your work hour is over.)
At 6pm, again, let the family know you’re going to work until 7pm. Set that alarm for 6:55pm, work hard, and then shut down the phone and put it away until the next afternoon.
Other important things to do:
Delete all extra apps on your phone. Anything you waste time with.
Unfollow all the people/places on Facebook that are your rabbit hole… where you fall in and get distracted from work. You really don’t need to do anything on FB but check messages and maybe put up a post on a business page. Never scroll the feed!
