Time Spent is Time Gained.
You’re probably reading this on your smartphone right now. Do you know how many hours and minutes you’ve spent staring at this screen today? Take a guess? 30min? An Hour? Would you be amazed if I said the average smartphone user spends 3hr 16mins a day using their smartphone!?
The average smartphone user spends 3hr 16mins a day using their smartphone.
Crazy, right? I thought so too. I work in the industry and even I thought that number was high, inflated even. So I did a bit of my own research. I downloaded an app called Moment to track my smartphone usage… here’s what I saw:
I found that I was using my smartphone a lot, averaging 2 hr 37 mins a day. Feeling terrible that I allow a screen to consume so much of my time, I started to dig into the results to pay attention to what I was doing. Yes, I was on Twitter and Facebook, and I also spent a good amount of time using Paper — it’s the way to go! While I expected to be embarrassed by my results, I instead was surprised by how productive I was in the time I spent in front of my screen. I was actually saving time doing things on my phone that would have cost me more time to do in-person — banking, shopping, reviewing work documents, communicating with colleagues, sending pictures of my kids to my parents, texting my wife about daily schedules. These were all things that made my life easier simply by being accessible via my smartphone. Is that a bad thing?
We may see more time spent on smartphones, but we may also see more time saved.
Time is the only thing we can’t get more of.
I’m VP, Experience Innovation at Universal Mind — A Digital Agency. You can follow me on twitter at @merhl.
Note: This article was originally published on Universal Mind Blog, August 27, 2015.
