Recently, Google introduced various digital wellbeing tools to help people find a little bit more of a balance between life and technology.

I wanted to use them for myself for two reasons.

One, It's my job to really know our products inside and out and talk to the press about them.

But I knew that I had some adjusting I wanted to do in my own life.

Pretty much a typical day for me is I wake up at about 6 30 in the morning, take a look at my phone to see if there's any breaking news I should know about and do a quick look at my email, you know?

But then I pretty quickly have to put my phone down because I need to get my kids up and ready for school.

I'm a single parent, so it's only me in the house, and getting my kids up is a trial.

They, you know, go to bed pretty late.

And they, uh, don't pop out of bed in the morning.

And then I begin my commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where we work at Google on 15th Street and Eighth Avenue in Chelsea.

When I'm at work, I'm really not on my phone very much because I'm using my laptop to get back to e mails and check my calendar.

So we come home and I see my kids who've been at school all day.

They're usually pretty excited to see me and, you know, tell me what's been going on in there day or asked me to do something with them.

I do find that I need a little time to wean myself off the phone so I often times will come in, take a seat on the couch and just go through a few more e mails and give myself a little time to transition from from work to home on my phone.

It turns out that my kids were sort of in the same boat, you know, they've been at school all day.

They've been doing their homework.

They've been really engaged with Melissa, our baby sitter, and it gives me my time.

Thio, get what I need to don.

I usually listen to the news again, um, in the kitchen while I'm making my food and my daughter Annabelle who was really communicative person.

It makes it clear sometimes you know how many hours we've seen each other during the week.

You know, she and she's right, you know, we see each other in the morning for 45 minutes, and then we see each other for a couple hours on a week night before she goes to bed.

Um and that that really is something that can make you stop and think that all the time that you have together is really precious.

And the last thing you want to be doing is is, uh, wasting some of that time right or using it in a way that doesn't feel valuable and productive?

What I found using our digital wellbeing tools for the past month or so is that there's no one blueprint for how to use them.

You know, I think you have to be self aware, and you have to really think about what your habits are on your phone and what you want to change.

And also what you wanna bring into your life.

I My real goal, I'd say, is that in the time that I have with my kids during the week, I wanna make the most of that time.

I wanna be a little bit smarter about it.

Um, and the's tools, they're helping set a path for me to get there.