One-Sec: A Review

What types of things do you do without even thinking about it? Like a habit so engrained in you that it does not even cross your mind that it needs to be done…you just do it. Think like flushing the toilet or turning on your turn signal (hopefully you do both of those). The truth is, if we think through our lives we all have dozens if not hundreds of things we mindlessly do that keep us operating as human beings safely and efficiently. With the rise of technology and the smartphone, we have begun a new set of habits that instinctually happen. For example, when you are standing in line for a cup of coffee, what do you do? I know the vast majority of people pull out their phones. There isn’t a conscious thought, “I’m going to look at my iPhone,” it just happens. When it comes to determining the moral the advent of the internet and the smartphone, we often only focus on the types of content we are looking at to determine if it is good or bad. But, as Samuel Jones discusses in his book Digital Liturgies, the smartphone (like many other technological revolutions) has literally changed the way we live altogether. Now instead of standing in line at the coffee shop and talking to our neighbor we are  engaging with social media and advertisements on our iPhone. 

I became keenly aware of this as I parent. I noticed that I wasn’t spending a lot of cumulative time on social media, but I was looking at it almost anytime there was downtime. 2 minutes of reels here, 1 minute of checking notifications there, and pretty soon my cumulative social media time would stay under 1 hour a day, but my pick up amount would sail over 30 pickups. That meant instead of being keyed in on my family or my friends almost any time there was downtime I was being sucked into social media, even for a moment. This leads to shallow family time and disconnected friendships. 

Sure, I could just ditch my iPhone and get a flip phone or go off the grid altogether. But the reality is, I do enjoy looking at instagram reels or watching YouTube videos and an iPhone is super helpful for my job. I just needed to have a different approach to engage with this platform. I needed a strategy that was more intentional than my current way of life. So this leads me to the solution I have right now. 

I came across an app called one-sec that essentially forces you to pause before you open social media. Then at the end of the pause, it asks you if you would like to continue on to instagram or whatever app you have blocked. In all honesty, the first 48 hours I used this app, I probably had somewhere around 35-40 attempted opens that I blocked realizing I was opening instagram without even thinking about it. 

The result? I have literally decreased the amount of times I’m even clicking on instagram by 50%.