Phone Fever: How I Lose Hours A Week to The Electronics in My Pocket

Everyone has a smartphone and for many, it seems like it dominates our life. Not only have smartphones replaced many of the tools we previously needed to carry, but it has also revolutionized the way we communicate and share things. Although I don’t post to social media or often, I still find myself viewing it daily and wasting too much time on my devices. To verify my beliefs, I decided to track my phone usage and found interesting results.

My main focus was on how much time am I spending on and interacting with my phone. What I found was not that surprising. I found that in a week between September 17th and the 24th I used my phone for a total of 19 hours and 15 minutes. That means in a week I was on my phone for an average of 2 hours and 45 minutes per day. With that in mind, it means that I am losing multiple hours of my day to just looking at my screen often to the sacrifice of getting important things in my life done.

The main way I use my phone appears to be on various social media apps. My top five applications being Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google Chrome. Reddit is without a doubt my largest time waster coming in at 7 hours and 17 mins for the week. Most of these apps tended to have either similar features that kept me on them longer than I would typically realize. The most apparent feature being the use of Infinite Scroll, which allows me to scroll through multiple posts and threads without realizing how much time has passed because it’s a never-ending supply of new content. Secondly is the use of notifications to keep me checking in. Twitter and Instagram are the guiltiest of this letting me know when different people post and encouraging me to check out the new content. The Third thing done on Snapchat is the use of streaks which update when I message a person daily. Streaks make me feel the need to check-in and message people even when it’s not important.