‘I wake at 6.30am and go to bed at midnight ... about half my day is in front of a screen’
Total daily screen time: 8 hours
The first thing I do when I wake up, apart from a silent thanks for still being alive and a quick glance to see if Indy (our oneyear-old) is sleeping, is lift my mobile, put in the earpiece to listen to Good Morning Ulster and then trawl through the newspaper front pages online.
As a columnist and commentator I need to know what’s happening, as well as calculating if I’m likely to get a call from a programme or paper wanting some background to a particular story.
Sadly, it’s all downhill after that. For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, I find myself drawn to the trending section and then reading whole timelines about contestants from Love Island and Britain’s Got Talent — programmes I don’t even watch.
A passing headline — something like ‘World’s Fattest Cat Picks Winning Lottery Numbers’ — takes me off on another direction entirely and before I know it I’ve ended up, by way of a torturous process of travelling from one link to another, reading a piece about why drinking a mixture of pee and peppermint tea will increase my libido. (It doesn’t work).
Then it’s a switch over to my Twitter account (I don’t use Facebook or any other social media sites) to see what people are saying.
Because I’m lucky enough to have a number of radio/television/ newspaper outlets for my views, I make a point of trying to answer as many questions as I can.
If people have taken the time to read a column or listen to me somewhere, as well as taking the time to follow me online, I think I owe it to them to respond to reasonable questions or consider their counter arguments.
My only insistence is that all exchanges remain civil and bad language is avoided.
I also use my Twitter account for a lot of personal stuff about my own background (adoption, my struggle to communicate, our four miscarriages, being a much older dad and the sheer joy of my children — much of which I’ve written about in the Belfast Telegraph). I’m always aware of the dangers of over-sharing, but as someone who was very shy and lacking in confidence for so much of my life, I know from the huge responses to the personal pieces that people have both appreciated them and been helped by them.
A few years ago Lilah-Liberty, my middle child, persuaded me to put a few games apps on my phone. I restricted her to a maximum of 45 minutes a day.
Stupidly, I didn’t place the same restriction on myself: consequently I began to binge on Pac-Man and on some car race nonsense in which I seemed to spend my entire time going backwards while hurling graphic obscenities at my mobile.
The game apps have all been deleted. I told Lilah-Liberty she’d have to wait until she got a part-time job and bought her own phone; but she now borrows her sister’s or disappears under her duvet with one of the laptops.
I’m sure we should restrict use of all this tech: but Megan (19) is too big to control and Lilah-Liberty (almost 9) is mostly too fast to catch.
Indy, meanwhile, has worked out the purpose of the TV remote, although hasn’t yet worked out how to match the number buttons with his favourite programmes. It’s only a matter of time before he stops replacing Ben and Holly with the Parliamentary channel and then howling the place down.
I spend between two and three hours a day writing on a laptop.
Occasionally I need to find a reference or check something in particular and that means Google. The problem is, that while I’m supposedly trying to find something about an election result in 1972, I end up on a site about Sherlock Holmes or the cast of Neighbours (the only soap I watch). Last week I spent almost an hour — having seen one of those How Long Will You Live pop-up advertisements — trying to match my age, weight, alcohol consumption and sedentary lifestyle with the day I was likely to pop my socks. I was left hoping that either my maths or their statistics were wrong.
So, how much time do I spend in front of a screen of one sort or another? Three hours writing on a laptop (columns and opinion pieces). Two hours on Twitter. One hour on emails and texts (mostly work related). And a couple of hours on film or TV.
That’s eight hours. I wake around 6.30am and go to bed about midnight; which means that about half my day is in front of a screen.
That’s actually quite scary and I really should cut back. Hang on! My goodness me, I’ve just seen a headline about a dancing spaniel which can help cure my insomnia. I’ll finish this piece later...
❝ Last week I spent nearly an hour on one of those How Long Will You Live pop-up ads