Shock! Horror! Do you know how much time you spend on your phone?
Before beginning to write this article, I spent 20 minutes doing, if I’m honest, sort of nothing on my phone. Prior to that, I checked emails, read the news and browsed social media in bed. My phone is usually within arm’s reach, which seems to me fairly typical of everyone, old and young, who includes a phone in their essential trifecta of belongings, alongside their keys and wallet.
I spend an average of two hours and 20 minutes a day on my phone, according to my iPhone’s Screen Time function. As someone who writes about internet ephemera for a living, I feel justified in my habit of filter-feeding through social media like a megamouth shark. Yet it’s somewhat more difficult to be nonchalant when I realize my daily habits amount to me spending 35 days a year, or over five (five!) years of my remaining life, on my phone.
Darkly, that total does not include the hours I spend on my laptop, nor watching Netflix.
My unease made me wonder how my smartphone habits compared with those of my friends and colleagues. So I asked them to check their screen time.
According to research from RescueTime, one of several apps for iOS and Android created to monitor phone use, people generally spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones every day, with the top 20% of smartphone users spending upwards of four and a half hours.
Pickups are also an important metric in determining how our devices affect us. On average, we pick up our phones 58 times a day, and while some of our pickups, we like to think, are purposeful – a quick text or inbox check – in my experience (I pick up 39 times a day) such innocent glances have a mysterious way of leading to Twitter when really, I should be working.
Like John, I have no illusion of productivity when I grab my phone mid-work task. I agree with the halfcentury of cognitive science that concludes multitasking is a comforting fiction. I just … do it anyway.
My bad habit is probably related to what the author Michael Harris, in his 2014 book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, calls “a very basic brain function”: the “orienting response”. This is a version of that prehistoric impulse that compels us to eat lots of once scarce sugar and fat, but it underpins the attention economy rather than the junk food industry.
“Having evolved in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty,” Harris writes, “we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus.” He argues that constant pinging updates and push notifications (I get 66 a day) exploit human impulses.
“Exploit” is the operative word. We have less agency over our technology than we want to believe, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari. We’re more like “hackable animals”, Harari says – tracked by algorithms that “know us better than we know ourselves”.
To create psychological dependency, social media companies use similar tactics to those of casinos. These include pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll features, and they “activate the same brain mechanisms as cocaine”. Many tech-addiction studies focus on consequences for the young, yet the stress, distraction and negative mental health effects of being tethered to our phones affects users of all ages.
So how are we supposed to go about
regaining our time?
I asked Harris, who abstained from tech for 30 days as an experiment for his book, and now spends a trim 23 minutes on his phone per day.
It comes as a relief to hear Harris classify his month of digital austerity as “an incredible privilege”. “It’s not something that most people can do without losing their jobs, or losing track of children for that matter,” he said.
The tech moguls who invented social media are banning their kids from using it. Tech “detoxes” are becoming a trend in luxury travel. Ironically, disconnection itself seems to have become an elite privilege. “There’s a Thomas Edison line,” Harris said. “‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.’ And I think that today we’ve made the internet so accessible that only the wealthy will be disconnected.”
With cold turkey off the menu for us working folk, using monitoring apps such as RescueTime, Apple’s Screen Time and Google Digital Wellbeing can seem like a canny way to cut down on phone use. The only trouble is, as Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. To big tech, your screen time anxiety is just another data point to collect, not to mention an opportunity to capitalize on the marketing value of providing ostensibly altruistic “digital wellness” functions while simultaneously escalating their software’s addictiveness – keeping the responsibility to resist squarely on you.
Addressing tech malaise has become a trend with authors and selfhelp coaches – such as Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, who, during a $295, 50-minute phone call, will offer you advice on things like how to create roadblocks to checking your phone by putting a rubber band around your screen, and “think of the bigger picture” rather than what you’re missing on Twitter.
I find the lo-fi advice Harris derived from his analog stint quite valuable, myself. “The simple, and yet also more difficult way to manage our media diets,” he said, “is to literally walk away from the device entirely for stretches of time.”
My informal poll confirmed I’m not alone in thinking that mediating my phone habits depends mainly on my own self-awareness, common sense and willpower – with other tactics being useful but supplementary.
Harris didn’t bring his phone to our interview – and not just to make a statement. “I leave it behind when I’m just leaving the house for a little while and know I won’t need it,” he says. To me, a phone-keys-wallet devotee, that seems a little bit terrifying. I’ve resolved to try it.