The more time you use your iphone the

Shock! Horror! Do you know how much time you spend on your phone?

Writer Adrienne Matei spends two hours and 20 minutes a day on her phone – which might seem fine, until you realize it amounts to 35 full days a year. What’s your number?

People spend about three hours and 15 minutes a day on their phones, according to the app RescueTime. Photograph: Getty/Guardian Design/Francisco Navas

People spend about three hours and 15 minutes a day on their phones, according to the app RescueTime. Photograph: Getty/Guardian Design/Francisco Navas

Last modified on Wed 21 Aug 2019 06.01 BST

B efore beginning to write this article, I spent 20 minutes doing, if I’m honest, sort of nothing on my phone. Prior to that, I checked emails, read the news and browsed social media in bed. My phone is usually within arm’s reach, which seems to me fairly typical of everyone, old and young, who includes a phone in their essential trifecta of belongings, alongside their keys and wallet.

I spend an average of two hours and 20 minutes a day on my phone, according to my iPhone’s Screen Time function. As someone who writes about internet ephemera for a living, I feel justified in my habit of filter-feeding through social media like a megamouth shark. Yet it’s somewhat more difficult to be nonchalant when I realize my daily habits amount to me spending 35 days a year, or over five (five!) years of my remaining life, on my phone.

Darkly, that total does not include the hours I spend on my laptop, nor watching Netflix.

My unease made me wonder how my smartphone habits compared with those of my friends and colleagues. So I asked them to check their screen time.

I spend three hours and 53 minutes per day on my goddamn phone, which is a lot of time. But that said, I do a lot of reading long-form pieces. It’s not just all looking at selfies and cute bunny memes, even though that is a huge factor, I’m sure.
Alex, 28, writer

Per day, I’m on it for three hours and 36 minutes, and then the weekly total is 25 hours, 15 minutes, which is gross. It’s not good, but I feel like there are people who are worse.
Austin, 25, retail employee

Oh my God, it’s excessive. So it’s telling me my average per day is four hours, four minutes. I do a lot of emailing on there so that’s probably it.
Dara, 30, business executive

I spend an alarming amount of time on my phone. Almost five hours a day. Sometimes it even hits six, usually during periods of my life when I’m feeling bored and lonely. It’s like constantly opening and closing your front door, hoping that someone will be there when they almost never are.
Max, 28, journalist

According to research from RescueTime, one of several apps for iOS and Android created to monitor phone use, people generally spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones every day, with the top 20% of smartphone users spending upwards of four and a half hours.

Pickups are also an important metric in determining how our devices affect us. On average, we pick up our phones 58 times a day, and while some of our pickups, we like to think, are purposeful – a quick text or inbox check – in my experience (I pick up 39 times a day) such innocent glances have a mysterious way of leading to Twitter when really, I should be working.

Most of the time when I use my phone I’m kind of in zombie mode – I pick it up to look at the time and then the physical act of doing that prompts me to do something else.
John, 51, editor

Like John, I have no illusion of productivity when I grab my phone mid-work task. I agree with the half-century of cognitive science that concludes multitasking is a comforting fiction. I just … do it anyway.

My bad habit is probably related to what the author Michael Harris, in his 2014 book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, calls “a very basic brain function”: the “orienting response”. This is a version of that prehistoric impulse that compels us to eat lots of once scarce sugar and fat, but it underpins the attention economy rather than the junk food industry.

“Having evolved in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty,” Harris writes, “we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus.” He argues that constant pinging updates and push notifications (I get 66 a day) exploit human impulses.

“Exploit” is the operative word. We have less agency over our technology than we want to believe, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari. We’re more like “hackable animals”, Harari says – tracked by algorithms that “know us better than we know ourselves”.

My use has increased steadily thanks to the advent of social media and colorful things that make noise on my phone.
Tyler, 31, small business owner

To create psychological dependency, social media companies use similar tactics to those of casinos. These include pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll features, and they “activate the same brain mechanisms as cocaine”. Many tech-addiction studies focus on consequences for the young, yet the stress, distraction and negative mental health effects of being tethered to our phones affects users of all ages.

So how are we supposed to go about regaining our time?

I asked Harris, who abstained from tech for 30 days as an experiment for his book, and now spends a trim 23 minutes on his phone per day.

It comes as a relief to hear Harris classify his month of digital austerity as “an incredible privilege”. “It’s not something that most people can do without losing their jobs, or losing track of children for that matter,” he said.

As I’m launching my business I actually have to learn how to use social media better. It could be a full-time job for me to be on Instagram.
Olivia, 28, personal trainer

I get a lot of notifications because I have a number of daily alarms to remind me to take medication.
Dara

The tech moguls who invented social media are banning their kids from using it. Tech “detoxes” are becoming a trend in luxury travel. Ironically, disconnection itself seems to have become an elite privilege. “There’s a Thomas Edison line,” Harris said. “‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.’ And I think that today we’ve made the internet so accessible that only the wealthy will be disconnected.”

With cold turkey off the menu for us working folk, using monitoring apps such as RescueTime, Apple’s Screen Time and Google Digital Wellbeing can seem like a canny way to cut down on phone use. The only trouble is, as Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. To big tech, your screen time anxiety is just another data point to collect, not to mention an opportunity to capitalize on the marketing value of providing ostensibly altruistic “digital wellness” functions while simultaneously escalating their software’s addictiveness – keeping the responsibility to resist squarely on you.

Addressing tech malaise has become a trend with authors and self-help coaches – such as Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, who, during a $295, 50-minute phone call, will offer you advice on things like how to create roadblocks to checking your phone by putting a rubber band around your screen, and “think of the bigger picture” rather than what you’re missing on Twitter.

I find the lo-fi advice Harris derived from his analog stint quite valuable, myself. “The simple, and yet also more difficult way to manage our media diets,” he said, “is to literally walk away from the device entirely for stretches of time.”

My informal poll confirmed I’m not alone in thinking that mediating my phone habits depends mainly on my own self-awareness, common sense and willpower – with other tactics being useful but supplementary.

Everyone responds to emails so quickly, or to Slack messages, and I purposely don’t check these things for hours at a time just so I can focus … I’m sure I’ve probably annoyed people who want a response faster than I’ve given it to them, but I think people feel entitled to other people’s time far more than they should.
Karl, 30, geneticist

Sometimes I go away for the weekend and I love places with no cell reception.
Tyler

Harris didn’t bring his phone to our interview – and not just to make a statement. “I leave it behind when I’m just leaving the house for a little while and know I won’t need it,” he says. To me, a phone-keys-wallet devotee, that seems a little bit terrifying. I’ve resolved to try it.

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Screen Time – Manage Your iPhone Use

We all spend lots of time with our smartphones, sometimes even too much considering terms like “smartphone addiction” are not uncommon. This can cause health issues as well as wasting away precious time that could be spent otherwise. Apple has been aware of this issue for a while and took action in introducing “Screen Time”. The feature measures time spent on your iPhone and can also limit time spent on apps.

Check your iPhone use with Screen Time

“Screen Time” is a helpful feature to check and manage your time spent on iPhone. Even though it needs a bit of discipline to change old habits. To check your iPhone use open your “Settings” and tap “Screen Time”. Now your iPhone should appear at the top of the list and you can tap on your iPhone.

Now you should see the time spent on iPhone with a view of “Today” and the “Last 7 Days”. Now you can find out which apps took up most of your screen time. Note that some apps are combined in categories like “Entertainment” for music as well as video apps.
The colored bars in the diagram show, when and how long you were active. To find out more details just tap on one of the bars.

Check Details on Screen Time

Screen Time also tracks, which apps were “Most Used” as well as your “Pickups” and “Notifications”. Pickups are the numer of times you picked up your iPhone and activated the screen checking for time or new messages. You can also find out, when you avaragely pick up your iPhone most. The “Notifications” section details which apps send the most notifications to your iPhone and when.

Manage Screen Time with “Downtime” & “App Limits”

While “Screen Time” can be used to track and inform, the feature can also manage time spent on your device. The “Downtime” and “App Limits” features can be used to restrict your iPhone use, better manage your screen time and waste less time online. This way you can spend more time with friends and family around you. An additional benefit for parents: Parents can use the time managing features to limit their childrens screen time and control app and website access and use.

Downtime

The “Downtime” feature battles excessive iPhone use by giving you a chance to schedule times without your iPhone during the day. You can reserve these time slots for yourself or friends and family and conciously spend time without being online.
During “Downtime” your screen will turn completly white and and show an hourglass icon. After your scheduled downtime is over you can use your iPhone like you are used to.

App Limits

The “App Limits” feature is a little less radical. With “App Limits” you can schedule downtime for specific apps during the day. In the Screen Time section tap “App Limits” and add apps by tapping “Add” and selecting apps from the list you want to use less. Now adjust the time limit.
No worries you change it later on, if the previous setting doesn’t work out for you.

As soon as you reach your scheduled time limit the app icon will turn gray and an hourglass symbol will appear next to the app name. Now you still ignore the time limit if you tap “Ignore Limit” on your screen although we cannot recommend this, as it undermines your plan.

App Limits has a special feature for apps you do not want to limit. App you add to “Always Allow” will not be affected by any scheduled time limits. These can be adjusted at any time.

Benefits for Parents

Parents can make use of the “Screen Time” features by limiting access to apps and websites through “Content & Privacy Restrictions” and limit screen time remotly for their childrens iPhones. This way they can make sure their children are protected and can only access content suitable for children and spend their time with friends or in school in the real world instead of watching Netflix during classes.

All in all the Screen Time features has numerous benefits but also requires discipline and a reflective review of your personal iPhone use.

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Question: Q: Screen Time shows «Ignore Limit» on child’s iPhone

I’ve updated our family’s iPhones to iOS 12 and I’m using Screen Time to manage my kids’ iPhone usage. Screen Time is pretty buggy which is no surprise since it’s still early, but there’s one issue that basically makes it totally ineffective for parental controls.

Normally when my kids try to open an app that’s been blocked by Downtime (the schedule you set), there’s a message that says it’s blocked with a link to «Ask For More Time». But yesterday we noticed that when one of my kids opened up a blocked app the link said «Ignore Limit». This basically allowed her to open the app and use it with no restrictions. I restarted her iPhone by holding down the home and power buttons until the Apple logo appeared. I checked the blocked apps again and this time the restriction was working correctly. But there was one app that wasn’t being affected by Downtime at all. I checked it this morning and somehow it’s working correctly.

But this evening my other kid needed some more time with an app so I told her to request more time. She said she requested it but I didn’t receive any request on my end. Turns out her Screen Time had the same issue where it was showing the link to «Ignore Limit». So I looked at her Screen Time settings and saw that «Block At Downtime» was turned off. I turned it on and it changed the blocked apps to «Ask For More Time». But her Messages app wasn’t being affected by Downtime. I’m guessing it was because she ignored the limit? So I restarted her iPhone by holding down the home and power buttons until the Apple logo appeared. The Messages app is still available and now all blocked apps are showing «Ignore Limit».

Would appreciate some thoughts on a solution from others who might have come across this.

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