Eight Hours - What Could You Do With the Time Your Phone Steals?

“Eight hours of my time last week. What else could I be doing with that?”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali pick up where the last one left off and turn the spotlight from connection back to the question we’d rather not answer: how much time is your phone actually taking from you? It starts with their podcast recordist Carl showing Kali the screen time setting on her iPhone that morning. Kali confidently guessed a couple of hours a week. The real number? Eight hours. In a single week. Steve, smugly, had his screen time tracking switched off – so he gets a free pass for now, but admits he probably wouldn’t fare much better.

From that one number, the conversation opens up into something bigger. How often do we tell ourselves we “haven’t got time” to learn something new, look for a different job, paint the spare room, do a course, get coaching – while a quiet eight hours a week disappears into scrolling we barely remember?

Steve and Kali run the maths (kind of) and the point lands: eight hours a week, every week, for a year, is not a small chunk of life. What could you write, walk, learn, finish, or simply enjoy with that time back?

The second half gets into the NLP of it. Because we are, as Kali puts it, a bunch of habits – strategies running on autopilot, including the morning grab-the-phone reflex that eats ten minutes before you’ve even stood up. NLP can’t fix that on its own. As Steve puts it, it’s like learning a musical instrument: there’s no point knowing the technique if you never pick it up and play.

They introduce the idea of a pattern interrupt – deliberately replacing one habit with another – and share a lovely tip Kali picked up somewhere: look at some sunshine before you look at your phone in the morning. Open the curtains, step outside, get the natural dopamine hit before the digital one. Steve, fairly, points out this is harder in Manchester in winter.

The point still stands: small interrupts, repeated, quietly change everything. If you’ve been telling yourself you don’t have time for the thing you actually want – check your screen time, and then decide what to do with what you find.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Carl’s iPhone screen time suggestion – and Kali’s eight-hour shock
• Why “I haven’t got time” usually isn’t true
• The maths nobody wants to do: eight hours a week, multiplied across a year
• Why NLP only works if you actually apply it (the musical instrument analogy)
• The “pattern interrupt” – a simple NLP tool for breaking habits
• A morning experiment: sunshine before scrolling
• Why we are, fundamentally, a collection of habits – and the ones we choose