Why I love Apple Screen Time feature
I used to pick up my phone more often, irrespective of whether I needed it or not, to check out the Social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Thanks to the infinite scrolls in these apps which made me glued to the phone. I used to spend several hours on my phone and I had no control over it.
I used to stare at the phone at a stoplight, in front of the oven, at the dining table, even in the bathroom, to check out these social networking apps. I uninstalled these apps several times, hoping that it would help me to cut down my time. But then, I found myself accessing these websites via browsers.
Honestly, I don’t blame myself for accessing these apps, as they help me to stay up-to-date on what’s happening around the world and stay connected with friends and family. But truly the problem was the amount of time, I was spending on these apps.
As per Statista, on an average, an American spent 1 hr 57 minutes per day, just on Social Networking apps in 2018.
That’s when I thought that I needed a way to control the amount of time that I was spending, but there was no easy way to do that. Thanks to Apple, they introduced Screen Time feature in Apple devices starting iOS 12. I was so excited after hearing that announcement and started using it right away.
Screen Time enables the phone users to get insights into how they are spending time with apps and websites, It creates detailed daily and weekly Activity Reports that show the total time a person spends in each app they use, their usage across categories of apps, how many notifications they receive and how often they pick up their iPhone or iPad.
By understanding how they’re interacting with their iOS devices, people can take control of how much time they spend in a particular app, website or category of apps. The App Limits feature allows people to set a specific amount of time to be in an app, and a notification will display when a time limit is about to expire.
App Limits feature lets you set up the amount of time, that you want to spend on each app. While you are using the app, it sends you a reminder when a time limit is about to expire, and when it expires it freezes the app by showing an hourglass icon.
I did set up 15 minutes time limit for my social networking apps. Some times, this app limit annoys me, as the screen is frozen, while I am in the middle of reading an interesting story. This is almost like, while you are enjoying your drive in Audi, you hit the red signal.
You can click on the Ignore Limit to borrow a few more minutes to finish what you are doing. But if you continue to ignore limits, maybe this is not helping you. Whenever I ignore the limit, I feel guilty and question my self, if I really need to ignore the limit or if I can stop using that app right away. I know some people may not like this feature at all, as it gets in your way. I think it’s an individual’s choice.
Like any other feature, this also needs some fine-tuning. I read some concerns over the internet about this feature, here is a couple of those.
- Some people mentioned that they found it difficult, to set up the limits.
- Some people mentioned that, if they access a link from Twitter or any other app, the amount of time that they spend reading that article is being counted under that app’s time limit.
I am sure Apple will fine-tune this in the future and make it even more easy to configure. However, I see this is a compelling feature as is. This feature helped me a lot to cut down my Social networking apps usage. I felt like, I regained control of my life and started to see that extra time in my day.
Guess what I am doing with all that extra time, I started following my dream. I always wanted to tell stories over the internet, write content and share with the world but I never found that time before. Now that I am finding that extra time in my day, I started reading and writing articles on Medium.
If you haven’t already set up the App time limits and would like to do that, you can visit the below article to set up this and regain control :)
https://www.onlyinfotech.com/2018/09/20/how-to-use-screen-time-in-ios-12-mac/
