The July experiment: week three

75% of the experiment is behind me, and if there’s one thing I learned, it's that screen time on iPhone works like shit. It’s as reliable and consistent as a politician. Let me dump some raw data first, and then I’ll do some normalising and share why I think screen time is broken.

Monday    : 1:08 (0:31)
Tuesday   : 1:49 (1:07)
Wednesday : 1:38 (1:13)
Thursday  : 1:21 (1:04)
Friday    : 5:00 (5.52)
Saturday  : 2:28 (2:14)
Sunday    : 2:54 (4:04)

As you can see, that’s a very odd set of numbers compared to the previous two weeks. And sometimes the number in parentheses—the manual sum of all categories listed inside screen time—is higher than the total number automatically reported for that specific day. Which makes zero logical sense.

Ok, now, those high numbers are easy to explain: I did a few road trips, and that’s Google Maps being open while I was driving. But, screen time is also broken in other ways because on Sunday, for example, is reporting almost 40 minutes of Telegram between 6 pm and 7 pm. The problem is, I was driving at the time. And I was definitely not spending time on Telegram. I just checked and I sent 10 messages in that timespan, almost all of them while I was stuck in traffic because of a car crash. It’s also reporting, again inside something called screen time, 40 minutes of Spotify usage, and that was me and the gf listening to music. I don't know about you, but that is definitely not what screen time is to me. Screen time to me means I have the phone in my hand and I’m doing something on that stupid screen. Spotify playing songs while connected to the car doesn’t fit that definition.

Having said that, this was a useful weekend as a datapoint because if I ignore Google Maps, if I ignore Spotify playing music in the car, and if I ignore the time I allegedly spent on Telegram, between Saturday and Sunday, my screen time was 21 minutes. That’s total across the two days. And that tracks with what I’m seeing myself doing with the phone at this moment. Outside of communication, I’m barely touching this thing. The automatic grabbing of my phone from my pocket out of boredom is completely gone. If I pick it up, it's because I’m mindfully and intentionally doing something with it. That was the whole goal of this experiment so I’m happy with that.

Still doesn’t change the fact that screen time is broken as fuck. Shocking, I’d say, considering Apple is so awesome at software these days… Anyway, I’m still going to finish this experiment because I’m committed to the whole month, but I’m not sure what more I’m going to learn from it. What I do know is that June’s experiment is still paying dividends. I’m reading a lot more, and this morning I pushed the length of my meditation sessions up to 25 minutes. Very happy with both of those things.