Figured it’s about time to start a thread about what one has found out about phone usage, app usage, and the like.
I spend less time on social media than I thought!
And I spend too much time on my phone when I should be going to sleep. So now I have an extremely locked down iPhone at night with the downtime setup. If I need to access something I’ll ignore the downtime for 15 minutes.
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This has been a very atypical week for me. I’m traveling and I did not bring a laptop on this trip. That means that on one hand Screen Time is capturing everything I’m doing on my devices, but on the flip side my activities are very different from usual.
That said, not a ton of surprises. Lots of time in Safari and Reeder (top two sites are talk.macpowerusers.com and learn.macsparky.com). A ton of time in Maps while I was driving on Sunday. Lots of Camera, Photos, and Darkroom taking and editing photos. OmniFocus is seeing a lot of use, primarily because I’m poking around in it while I watch the MacSparky Field Guide.
More pickups than I thought I’d have, but a lot of them are on days when I was taking a lot of pictures. I’ll be interested in seeing what those are like on more normal days.
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I’m really not a fan of this new feature, I use my devices how I see fit. I’m an adult and should be able to judge myself what is appropriate and show a little self-control. Yes, I agree it could be useful for children and teenagers but there seems to be a trend towards reliance on technological solutions to everything when a little self-control will work much better.
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By default Screen Time is a data feature, not a control feature. Frankly I’m happy that I can judge what usage is appropriate based on actual data rather than fallible human memory.
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That’s my take too. If you choose you can set app specific or category limits.
How/where are you seeing what websites you visited most? Can’t find that under Safari in Screentime? Or is this confirmed from you from observation?
I’ve learnt that I’m really good at avoiding opening it and seeing how bad it is 
Highly visited sites show up in the list of apps for me.
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So generally speaking I know I spend a good amount of time on social media. I’d be curious breakdowns per day especially for instance getting texts.
I have fewer pickups than I’d expected. It’s usually only 2/hour although it’s quite a bit higher on days when I’m traveling and away from my Mac.
I learnt exactly how under control my notifications were, and fixed it. I managed to drop from around 100 per day to 6, and have a much better quality of life for it
I am only using on my iPads as an android user I believe the google app is still in beta to do it on my phone, but I should check that.
Obligatory screen time photo, I want to spend more time reading as that is how I am consuming technical manuals at the moment
What are your notifications reduced to on your iPad?
I now only get notifications from onmifocus and technically pocket casts, but that the lock screen player controls, not a real notification, I was getting a surprising number of messenger and email notifications despite my previous attempts to the contrary, now they are both disabled, if someone has a real emergency they can call me and the rest will be dealt with on my own terms
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I am in the “I daren’t look’ camp…
33h using the Shortcuts.app in the last 7 days. WTH!
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Interesting insights. I still wish that they’d let people change or tweak various categories as some apps are considered stuff I think falsely are attributed.
I agree, they also are not tracking background usuage, pocket casts only tracks when I actually have it open not while it is playing which I guess is the expected behaviour for something called screen time.
This adds to arguments that I have made before that these secrete API’s that Apple is using to do these kinds of things should be opened up to 3rd parties, I would love to see things like timingapp be able to expand onto the phone, being able to properly track iOS, would make billing for that time much more viable and be a boon to free agents.
If opened up a new market in data analytics could open up, to understand not just how I use my device day over day but month over month or even year over year, I can’t gain understanding into why I always open Facebook at 10:25am if I don’t have the data to know that I am doing that, which I don’t really get with this implementation.
It’s a good first effort, but there is so much more potential here.
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Agree with the more potential aspect, there’s so much that could be done.