How Apple’s New ‘Screen Time’ App Helped Me Reduce My Mobile Usage by 50%

Apple has put our digital wellbeing on the table. But are we doing anything about it?

Published in

Tectonic

6 min readApr 9, 2019

I’m not a mobile junkie by any stretch of the imagination. I try and manage my screen time. Years ago someone recommended I buy an alarm clock to go next to my bed, so I’m not instantly transported into the digital world as soon as I as wake up. That helped a lot. I also deleted Instagram a while back when I realised I was that guy hitting ‘like’ on the toilet.

But, still, I can feel a certain draw towards my mobile. I’m not quite Gollum, but I often randomly activate it and quickly scan the apps, even though there’s nothing new there. I also regularly have split-second heart-attacks when I pat my pocket and realise it’s not there. Until I spot it resting idly where I left it.

It’s a weird ‘addiction’. If that’s the right word…

Apple’s Screen Time

In September 2018, Apple unveiled its new digital wellbeing service, Screen Time, an app designed to help people reduce the amount of time “they spend glued to their screens”. In short, every Sunday users receive a report that logs their app usage, notifications and pickups. Crucially, Screen Time allows users to set daily time limits for individual apps and provides valuable data so users can decide to decrease certain notifications.

After 6 months of these weekly reports I realised that this digital wellbeing tool may have been dutifully informing me on how much screen time I incur each week — on average, 2–3 hours a day — but rather than inspire any healthy-habit change, it was leaving me feeling deflated as I was more aware than ever of own ‘addition’.

So, last month I decided to implement change…

Screen Time Ain’t Perfect!

OK, before I tell you how I did it, there are a few caveats that I need to share…

I do 90% of my work, study and play on my MacBook, not on my iPhone! And Screen Time doesn’t connect to that. So regardless of it helping me reduce my mobile time by 50%, who knows if my MacBook usage just went up and up?! (That’s a big flaw in the system.)
However, the big result from this exercise is that I reduced my WhatsApp usage by 7 hours (50%). I didn’t install WhatsApp on my laptop so I can categorically state that a 7-hour reduction of this enormously time-zapping app definitely occurred.

Week 1

1. The Screen Time banner notification arrives on Sunday morning.

2. The report’s headline takeaways are:

Total Screen Time: 14 hours 45 mins
Average per day: 2 hours 6 mins
WhatsApp: 7 hours 1 min

3. Shamefully, WhatsApp is approx 50% of my entire screen time.

Which means if I can half my WhatsApp usage then I will dramatically decrease my screen time.

4. I use WhatsApp for an average of 1 hour a day.

However, as the graph displays, this average does represent my actual usage.

Eg: On Friday (08.03.19), I used WhatsApp for 4+ hours.

On this day, I had a deadline for a group project and we were in constant communication. On other days in the week (Tues, Wed, Thurs & Sat), I used WhatsApp for under an hour a day.

5. Pickups are when engage I with my mobile i.e. unlock it

Average of 90 per day
130 on Tuesday
WhatsApp was accessed 214 times directly after pickup

5. Notification-Saturation

6. My goal was to reduce my screen time in the next week by 50%.

Screen Time app offers several features to aid this:

I cap my WhatsApp usage to 30 mins a day.

I remove notifications from WhatsApp, Gmail & Podcasts, the three main offenders (400 out of 430 notifications last week).

Week 2

1. WhatsApp Time Check

Activated on Friday (15.03.19) and Saturday (16.03.19), WhatsApp notifies when nearing the end of my 30 min limit. I override it twice to give me 15 mins more.