Screen Time: My Truth about Phone Consumption

After taking a quick look at my screen time, I quickly realized how much my phone consumes my life. My daily average screen time is about 8 hours with around 1oo daily notifications. My notifications and daily pickups are very close in quantity, which makes sense — when you get a notification, you pick up your phone, right? However, where the notifications come from versus what my first used apps are, differ.

Most of my notifications come from Instagram and Messages because that is what I use to communicate with my family and friends. The notifications that I get from these apps are not always important, though, as they’re usually from ongoing conversations from group chats — I hop in when I please. My first used apps after pickup are Twitter and Spotify, even though I do not receive nearly as many notifications from those apps.

I use Spotify during my passing times, whenever I’m walking to or from anywhere on campus. Twitter is commonly used as a source of news, so when I wake up in the morning, I naturally gravitate towards that app. Throughout the day, I check my Twitter to pass time when I’m bored, but it does not last long because Twitter feeds have an end point. When I run out of content, I move onto the next app…

Nowhere in those categories do I see my most used app of all time: TikTok. I spend at least twice as much time on TikTok than I do on any other app, despite receiving barely any notifications from it. TikTok is proven to be an addicting app, simply because of its never-ending timeline full of brief and short videos. Not to mention the unpredictability of the app: you never know what you’re going to see when you scroll to the next video. These features keep me running back to the app when I have nothing else to do.

These numbers accurately depict the relationship between me and my phone. I, as a teenager, spend most of my time on social media, especially TikTok, for obvious reasons. Clearly, nothing that I do on my phone is productive in any way, but it’s because I spend that time on my laptop.