Do you track your screen time?
Something that slips most peoples’ mind is how often they use their phones. I am one of those people. In order to see my habits and daily usage total, I decided to turn on my screen time tracker. Most days are different from the others considering my schedule, but I chose to analyze a day that I usually reserve to relax. I started that day off by waking up at 12pm, and from there on I was using my phone. I didn’t think too much about it and even forgot that I had the screen time tracker on. It tracked the amount of time I picked up my phone, notifications, and app usage. It also showed me the number of minutes and hours I used each app. The number of times I picked up my phone was a total of 79. The number of times my phone had a notification was a total of 139. I find it surprising that I didn’t pick up as many times as my notifications. The biggest shocker was the total of hours and minutes I used that day. It came out to a total of 11 hours and 30 minutes. To assist this, I created a graph to showcase those hours and minutes in Adobe Illustrator. My most used app time was 3 hours and 52 minutes on TikTok. I use TikTok quite often and it’s easy to just keep scrolling. I was shocked at how long I used the app, but then I remembered that TikTok even reminds me of ads to stop scrolling. The second most used app was Messages. I text people on a regular basis, but I didn’t know how many hours a day I spend doing it. More apps and usage time are shown in the graphics. There are 24 hours in a day and I use half of it on my phone. It was an eye-opener, and I hope to use my phone less. Realistically speaking though we are in a time of new apps, technology, and pandemic. Everything is online now. I think there’s also a misconception that using your phone for hours means you’re being unproductive, but that’s not true. People use their phones for various reasons and often for work. I hope to try and change a bit of my phone usage as time goes on too. If you’d like to see your own screen time go to your phone settings and there should be an option to turn it on or view it. There’s also screen tracking apps you can download to check. You might be surprised.
