Not specific enough. Say it shows I’m using the kindle app. Great, I want to know how many hours were reading programming books or non-fiction vs how many in thriller and how many cozy mysteries.
Or take Safari, was I just goofing off, doing a google search realted to something or some work or farm project or reading news and forums?
Or say it shows I was on Facebook. It calls that Social Media, However, the only use I have for Facebook is 2 groups on photography and photo organizing, and 2 groups on sheep. I’d want to know how long I was in heac of those groups. And neither of those cases is social media for me, it’s work. Especially sicne I hate Facebook.
So screen time does not provide fine enough data for me.
It’s the same problem I have with most of the timing apps that track usage on the Mac too. When I boot my machine I automatically load Safari, Calendar, Mail, Omnifocus and DEVONThink. But I use all those tools for work and play projects and the information on how much time I am in those apps doesn’t tell me what I was using it for.
So what I do is every once in a while I track my time on 6 minute increments, what was I doing the last 6 minutes. reason it that’s an easy decimal of hours and minutes. So I can spend, say 6 minutes here on MPU using safar and that’s one category and 6 minutes on Safari entering in sheep data to the on-line poriton of the registry, those are totally different uses for the same app.
Ditto for Scrivener, LibreOffice, Kindle and nearly all apps I use.
I tried timings and it was a bit better but still not nearly granular enough for me. Then I stepped back and said why do I really care?
Turns out that the only time I realyl worry about how much time I am spending on tasks is when I have too much on my plate. And I’d be beter served by doing an in depth review of those projecgts and see what ones I can postpone or get rid of. I can rarely delegate to anyone (sheep don’t take direction well ) so it’s me or not for most of what I have in my task manager.
Since I flip back-and-forth between the iPad and my Mac Screen Time really isn’t very useful. I check it occasionally for apps that I use only on the iPad. Some of the category classifications of apps don’t make sense and can’t be changed to reflect how I use them. Now how will it classify the time I spent on MPU Talk?
I used it heavily on the Mac in 2016-2017. The scheduling and the ability to quickly choose which set of blockers you want to use are more useful than Screen Time’s. It’s also harder to undo in the middle of a session, if you want that.
Do you know if its possible to set a non-repeating iOS Settings Screen Time session as it is in Freedom?
For example, if I need to work the next 45 minutes and I definitely dont’ want to be distracted. Then Screen Time that’s not really possible with Screen Time right? As it’s more for repeating schedules, or what?
I’m also thinking about handing my Screen Time password to someone else so that I can’t disable it and then have it set from 9 pm - 6 am and only allow reading and video apps to be allowed in that period, like Books, Kindle, Youtube and Netflix.
Right, it’s not possible. The ability to hit a button and jump into a one-time focus session, as well as run a bunch of different scheduled ones, is just not there in Screen Time.
Handing over your Screen Time password is a powerful method, though!
