I am not the first person to admit this, and I am definitely not the last, but I have a bit of a love affair with my phone. More specifically social media, but even when I'm not on social media I'm constantly checking if I have any notifications. A notification whore if you will.
But I didn't realise how much I was in denial about my screen time and phone usage until I downloaded the 'Moment' app. And today I'm willing to admit to that.
Moment is simply an app which tracks your screen time. You may download it just to be a little bit nosey, but you will quickly become paranoid.
I started on Monday 6th March.
Monday
Because this was the first day of using it, I think I was very much aware of the time I was spending on my phone, so probably not particularly accurate. I was travelling back up to Nottingham, so rather than spending the four hour journey scrolling through Twitter and catching up on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I read some magazines instead. The one thing I immediately noticed was that I hadn't had to use my portable battery pack halfway through my journey, which is obvious but it kind of felt like a mini sense of achievement. I still felt the need to pick up my phone, especially when I got in to bed, but I turned my wifi off at 11 in attempt to force myself off of it.
Tuesday
On Tuesday the app challenged me to put my phone in my bag whilst I was commuting. The walk to uni was absolutely fine, but I was walking to and from different places quite a lot that day so it was hard to not do it at least once. I spent 2 hours and 44 minutes and picked my phone up a total of 110 times. 30 minutes of this was just being on my home/lock screen, which tells you what my worst habit is.
Wednesday
My next challenge was to not take any photos, including the use of Snapchat. Due to the nature of the day, where we were filming for our colour film project and having to document it, I definitely did not achieve this. However, I did realise how little I actually use Snapchat and it made me question whether or not to just delete it.
Thursday
My screen time was starting to average out by Thursday, as I generally spent about 2 and a half hours on my phone in total. It's painful to see because I could have done so much more uni work that I'm now stressing about if I had stopped looking at my phone for even half of that time. My challenge was to delete an app, but I was too scared to delete one of my "major" ones like Instagram or Snapchat, even though I was considering getting rid of it before, so I wimped out and just deleted a couple that I no longer used. An app spring clean.
Friday
Friday was a complete disaster. I spent 3 hours and 48 minutes on my phone. When you see your time in the red zone, you start to feel very guilty.
Saturday
My next challenge was to take a fakecation, where I set a period of time to go off grid. I think I actually turned my wifi off for about four hours in the end; only picking it up to text Harry a couple of times. Honestly, it felt really good and I'll be doing it more often. And keeping my screen time in the green zone (1 hour 40 minutes) also felt very good too.
Sunday
I returned to my 2 hour 30 minute average again, which was probably just down to the fact that I usually have Sunday's off from doing any uni work so I had more time to just scroll through Instagram and Twitter.
I think they've been very clever in the way that they use a green/orange/red system, because it's a system that we've all been conditioned to recognise since we were children. It's all psychological and it's because of this that you can easily start to panic and feel guilty and wanting to check it all the time to see where you're up to.
Overall, I think it's interesting to get an insight into how much screen time you use, and it's a topic that is definitely worth discussing and something I want to possibly address with my dissertation next year. However, the app itself is not worth keeping. It only makes you paranoid and obsessed, which are both negative traits, and eventually it starts to get annoying.
There are things I can take from it though. For example, the fakecation is definitely something I will make a habit of doing, especially when I really need to get some uni work done, and it might start to cure my notification obsession that I clearly have. In regards to Snapchat, I think I'm going to delete it; even if it's for a week.
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