1 Week With Google’s Digital Wellbeing App
I’m definitely addicted to my smartphone.
There’s a lot being said about smartphone addiction in the media lately, and after quitting social media (I’ve since gotten twitter back to engage with fellow writers) I honestly thought smart phone addiction was not something I had to worry about.
Well I was very wrong.
After just a week of putting Android Pie onto my Galaxy S7 the digital well being feature has painted a disturbing picture.
I was aware of the feature when I installed Android Pie. I deliberately didn’t take advantage of any of the addiction prevention features on first setup. I wanted to see for myself a clear before and after image.
The results have already shocked me.
Heres a quick run down:
- Saturday — 2 hours and 52 minutes — The biggest offender here was my settings app running in at 41 minutes, which is fair considering I was setting up My phone at first.
- Sunday — 4 hours and 55 minutes — This is what really shook me. When I seen this I was more than a bit freaked out. How could I spend 5 hours in a day staring at my phone screen and think I wasn’t addicted? I spent nearly 3 hours reading on medium this day on my phone, which isn’t too bad, but 5 hours staring at a phone is not healthy. I also spent 30 minutes on twitter, and here was me thinking I’d never get hooked on social media again.
- Monday — 1 hour and 56 minutes — 2 hours, not as bad as the day before but still a terrible amount of time to be taken from your day. — 56 minutes of this was medium
- Tuesday — 2 hours and 35 minutes — 1 hour and 13 minutes spent on youtube. I wouldn’t mind but I honestly can’t remember what I was watching. Not a single video. Yet I wasted over an hour of my life that day on it.
- Wednesday — 4 hours and 36 minutes — Another terrible day. Only this time I don’t have the excuse of saying I was reading on medium. It was 2 hours in chrome, mindlessly scrolling because, again, I can’t recall what I was doing on chrome for so long.
- Thursday — 2 hours 12 minutes — I was actually happy about this result when I seen an hour of it was spent in calls. I remember these calls and it’s pretty much the only things from the week where I recall what the usage was for. The rest of the day was divided up with 15 minutes here and there for twitter, medium, chrome and a few smaller things. Personally I’d consider that somewhat healthy usage.
- Friday — 3 hours 8 minutes — Another hour on YouTube I don’t remember, another 47 minutes on medium. A lot of time on WhatsApp. Again. Not good.
So here’s a quick breakdown.
That amounts to a total of 22 hours and 14 minutes for 1 week. That’s roughly 1,157 hours over the year if I stay at that level of usage.
Image, nearly a day of my week was spent staring at a phone screen. I think of all the things I could have done in that time. All the writing on I could have done. All the coding I could have done.
Obviously I would have used this in my “down time”. But let’s be honest, your mind is overloaded with content when you’re on your phone, it’s not really resting. I could have read, meditated, anything would have been better.
Now here’s the really scary number. 1,157 hours is about 48 days. 48 days! A year. That to me is just totally unacceptable. There’s no way I will allow this to continue in my life.
I received 597 notification in the last week on my phone and I had a lot of apps notifications disabled because I can’t stand my attention being taken away.
I guess I wasn’t as ruthless in disabling notifications as I thought.
To go from thinking my usage was minor to seeing the real numbers, has been a real eye opener to say the least.
I hope in reading this you take a look at your own usage. I was convinced my usage was healthy, especially without social media. I implore you to consider your own usage. How many minutes of your day gets stolen from you in small little chunks?
As always, Thanks for reading!
Gavin
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