How I’m Tracking My Screen Time

I recently wrote about how I’m reducing screen time, and at the end of that post I talked about taking the data from Apple’s Screen Time function to better understand my phone usage.

Well, I actually followed through on this promise! As there is currently no way to export the data, I set up a basic spreadsheet that collects the data points I’m interested in and manually entered everything in.

What My Screen Time Spreadsheet Tracks

Weekly Statistics:

• Most used apps and total hours of usage each week
• Categories of most used apps
• Average daily screen time
• Average number of pickups per day
• Average number of pop-up notifications per day

Daily Statistics:

• Total daily screen time per day
• Total number of pickups and notifications
• Top 5 most used app categories
• Top 10 apps used throughout the day + length of time spent on those apps

Apple’s screen time app is really good at putting your screen time usage in a neat little package with as little detail as possible upfront.

They hope that seeing our usage at a glance will be enough to satiate our curiosity of how we’re spending our time, and that we’ll move on to something else on our phone without a second thought. My screen time was down 13% from last week? Cool, I’ve successfully reduced my screen time. On to the next challenge!

But doing the actual work of manually entering, row by row, the length of time spent on a particular app or the total number of hours I spent on my phone each week forced me to confront the reality behind this “at-a-glance” overview.

By looking at my screen time usage on a more granular level and week-over-week (versus only the week prior), I am finally getting the visibility I need to get real results.

What My Screen Time Tells Me

Over the past 29 days, I learned that:

• My top 3 app categories are “Social Networking”, “Productivity”, and “Reading & Reference”. Social Networking apps held the top spot for 86% of the month.
  
• Digging deeper, Instagram and WhatsApp were my most used apps. I average about 3 hours and 10 minutes per week on these apps alone.
  
• The shortest amount of time spent on my phone in a day? 1 hour and 32 minutes
  
• The longest amount? 6 hours and 33 minutes

Unsurprisingly, these insights of my usage makes me cringe.

On average, I spend 3.5 hours on my phone every day. That means I’m spending one whole day a week just looking at my phone. Yikes.

I am not working at the moment, so I’m unsure whether this is a major contributor as I don’t know what my average usage was while I was employed. While I’m not too far from the average (this study showed average daily screen time as 3 hours and 15 minutes) I’m not too enthused with these numbers and want to improve them.

My Screen Time Goals For Next Month

Now that I have a baseline for my usage, I can head into November with some concrete goals. Next month, I challenge myself to:

• Reduce my average daily screen time to 2.5 hours (vs 3.5 hours currently)
• Reduce my time on Instagram to 2.5 hours per week (vs 3 hours 5 minutes currently)

May the odds be ever in my favor!