Hard Discussions With Myself re: Screen Time

Software
1

I’ve been battling with screen time for quite a while.

I’ve never had a TikTok account, I don’t post regularly to social media, and you won’t see me glued to my device while out to dinner with friends. Even still, I have some behaviours I’d like to nip in the bud. Listening to David and Mike on the Focused podcast helps, and David in general has brought a lot of information to light for me over the past few years.

But no matter how I re-work my home screen, or whether or not social media apps are on my phone, I find something to occupy my time. News, subreddits that follow my hobbies, group chats with friends (all have silenced notifications but still, what a rabbit hole), MPU Talk ( :grimacing:) – I can lose myself in reading and scrolling.

It occurred to me today that while I can make all these minor tweaks, the crux of the issue is that I have too many apps and things I want to keep track of. I need to practice selective ignorance and pare down the apps and services on my phone.

Here are a the things I have myself keeping track of, DAILY via apps or widgets, deeming them all to be things I want to keep up with. But there’s so many of them, it’s overwhelming.

  • Weather (small Carrot widget)
  • Calendar (medium Fantastical widget)
  • News (was using Reeder but that feels like a never ending firehose, even with just a few feeds). Now trying just the Globe and Mail app.
  • Fitness (Apple Fitness App)
  • LoseIt (Diet)
  • Streaks (health, writing etc)
  • Photo Memories (widget)
  • Day One Memories (widget)
  • Evernote (notes)
  • Obsidian (thinking notes)
  • Health (overall monitoring)
  • Pocket Casts (keeping up with tips on organizing all of the above)

So when you deem all of the above as being important daily, it’s hard to pare your phone down to be non-addictive.

I don’t know how those people who have 2 icons on their homescreen do it, but I think I want to find a happy medium somewhere. My homescreen has one medium widget and one small widget, and 12 apps. My second page has the large photo widget, the small DayOne “On This Day” widget, and 4 apps (NY Times, MySubaru (starts car), Reader and the Athletic). It’s not nearly as crazy as most phones I see, but it’s still too busy and too distracting.

What a battle.

6 Likes
2

I stress eat so I don’t keep snack food around, and when possible I deal with other temptations the same way. I use my phone mainly for email, calendar, tasks, and reminders. So my Home Screen has the Tasks, Due, and Gmail widgets. My dock has phone, messages, 1PW, and Assistant.

My second screen includes Home, Voice, Scannable, and Safari. A third screen has my travel apps, like Apple and Google maps, Waze, Uber, Podcasts, and YouTube Music. I wear an Apple Watch SE, which has no installed apps, so I can keep my phone in my pocket as much as possible.

No judgement, but if your iPhone was mine I would delete News, Streaks, Photo Memories, and Day One Memories. I can kick back and handle that later.

3 Likes
3

I hear you. This is tough!

What does ‘important’ mean? I would think about which of these services give you pleasure, and which create an emotional toll. For me, that’s news. I’ve worked quite hard to wean myself off the 24hr news cycle after realizing just how bad reading the news would make me feel. So one of those items on your list could account for a disproportiate amount of noise and overwhelm in your life. I mean – the calendar keeps you not missing your engagements, but I imagine it has a different impact on your day to day happiness.

Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism advocates for a ‘digital detox’ – I think the idea is that you axe nearly all of that digital clutter from your life and only bring back what you seriously miss and cannot live without. After 30 days :grimacing:. That might be too much as an approach depending on your taste for going cold turkey. It does speak to the fact that many of the services we deem essential we can easily live without. Then, once our time frees up, we can think about how we want to spend that most meaningfully.

Finally I also think it’s not really about what your phone offers in terms of app and how we organise our home screen (most of what you describe you can ultimately access through one app only, the browser. It is instead about discipline and re-setting your priorities for life a bit. A certain McSparky has done a lot of thinking about this – see his recently released Productivity Guide. But this is also really hard. Our best will and discipline can’t easily compete with the combined force of Silicon Valley’s attention merchants.

Good luck!

2 Likes
4

+1

5

If I’m honest, I know Streaks seems stupid, but I feel like if I remove the widget from my home screen I’ll lose track of – what I’m trying to keep track of. Eating better, exercising X times per week, meditating X times per week. I think for me that app bumps me into doing things I should be doing, so it’s good to have front and centre. Without it I forget to do these things.

I agree about the news. I like to keep up on general overviews in what’s going on with the world, but knowing every detail and nuance of every story isn’t possible. It’s also exhausting.

1 Like
6

I think there’s a question to be had before this one. Are you unhappy with the current amount of time you spend on your devices? Is it causing you a health issue that you do need to address (e.g. headaches, anxiety, etc.)? If your answer to both questions is no, just chill and live your life. “Screen time” is a somewhat invented concept, and over the years it’s mostly been a tool for admonishing parents about the “right” way to raise children. Now it’s a tool to admonish adults as well.

There are reasons you might want to reduce your screen time, but if you’re just “feeling guilty” in an abstract sense, either figure out the root cause or just accept that the media might be influencing you a bit.

If you spend 4 hours a night reading the news, information on your hobbies, and chatting to people, who is to say that’s of less value to your life than spending the 4 hours meditation and walking or whatever. Only you can decide which was the “better” option (and what is the best option is only relevant to that specific moment, another day you might feel differently).

Anyway, philosophy aside, most those widgets are things that add value or are necessary in my life (e.g. weather, calendar). And if Day One and Photo Memories add value to you, go for it! We can’t tell you differently!

I play Wordle and now some other word games every day. It relaxes me and makes me think about words, which I enjoy doing. So it’s of value to me. I have book reading widgets on my devices and look at them most days (the widgets, not the books!). Reading is important to me and I like tracking what I’m doing. So screen time looking at these things is of value to me. And I tell myself off for not using my hydration app more. I know that using it will improve my health, but I also often can’t be bothered during the day (to drink or to use the app… hence the need for it!). But I have rules around Instagram use, because I can get sucked into the feed for hours and I think that is a bad use of my time. Someone else might do most of their digital friendship maintenance via Instagram, so cutting their use would be bad for them. We’re all different.

1 Like