A while back, Apple added a feature to their iPhones that tracks the amount of time you spend looking at the screen and sends you a report at the end of the week. I usually don’t pay attention to this report because I get so many notifications during the average day, so I simply dismiss them. A few weeks back, I took the time to read the weekly report and realized that I use my phone a ton on the average day. Much of that time is spent using Facebook and Twitter, though a handful of other apps appear prominently. The crazy thing is that I had no idea I was using my phone that much. Since recognizing how much screen time I am getting, I have begun paying attention and trying to adjust my usage. What I have discovered is that my screen time skyrockets when I allow myself to do it mindlessly. Mindlessly indulging is easy to do, and often happens with eating, when people begin mindlessly grazing on snacks in the kitchen without paying attention to what they are doing. Before long, they have consumed a bag of chips or Oreos without realizing they were doing it. I don’t think I am alone in my tendency to spend way too much time online. I suspect that Apple added screen time tracking apps because many people are unhappy with how much they are using their phones or wasting time staring at screens. I believe it’s because it’s easy to check out mentally and enjoy the low stress brain stimulation that comes with staring at Facebook for hours at a time. I am not really ok with my new bad habit, which is forcing me to try to learn to be more mindful of how I use my down time. Researching “how to use my iPhone less” has yielded a handful of avenues for approaching the problem. The most obvious is simply leaving it somewhere where you can’t access it. My wife does this. She leaves her phone locked in the trunk of the car while we are out, or simply leaves it at home altogether. During her work day and at bedtime, she leaves it sitting on the charger in a different room, so she has to get up and walk to it before she picks it up and starts scrolling. This is a decent solution because it increases the energy required to actually start the activity. The result is that she cannot impulsively start using her phone. Impulsively picking up and checking your phone is a huge part of what makes our screen time increase. Apple tracks how many times a day you check your phone, and I was shocked at the number. Half the time I do it without thinking, and the number of times racks up quickly. Another approach that is popular for limiting phone time is using an app that notifies you when you reach certain amounts of screen time. So, at an hour it alerts you, at 2 hours it alerts you, and so forth. This breaks you out of the cycle of just using your phone constantly without paying attention to how much time has gone by. A final suggestion I encountered, which I think is worth noting, is to use phone time at designated time during the day. This would mean that you allow yourself 5 minutes of scrolling Facebook for every hour of work you get done or whenever you accomplish a task. This forces you to limit your time and be productive. Regardless of which strategy you employ, they all have this in common: forcing you out of the “automatic pilot” mode that we can so easily slip into when we pick up our devices.
