The July experiment: week two

Week two is behind me and I have to say, I am glad I tweaked the rules of my challenge because now it is at least a challenge. Having the phone with me forces my brain to entertain the possibility of using it in random moments throughout the day and that makes the whole experience a lot more interesting.

Here’s the data from week two:

Monday    : 1:20 (0:57)
Tuesday   : 1:33 (1:16)
Wednesday : 2:01 (1:30)
Thursday  : 2:30 (1:59)
Friday    : 2:29 (2.02)
Saturday  : 1:38 (1:02)
Sunday    : 1:06 (0:48)

Overall, the trend I saw on day one is continuing and every day, without exception, the most used apps are messaging apps that always account for more than 65% of the time spent on my phone (and sometimes that % goes up even higher).

The non-messaging time on my phone is down to pretty much nothing at this point. I’m looking at screen time right now and if I pick let’s say Wednesday, I spent a grand total of 13 minutes doing something on my phone: 1 minutes to register a read book on Literal, 1 minute on my banking app, 2 minutes on my email, and 9 minutes on Safari. That’s how I’m using my phone at the moment.

I’m only halfway through the experiment but I’m starting to think that this issue is now fixed. I can notice my brain only reaching for the phone maybe a few times a day but those occasions are easy to spot and very easy to deal with. Having said that, one thing I noticed is that I still pick it up way too much. The pickups section is reporting 71 on average for the week (it was 73 the week before, 115 before starting the experiment) and I think I can push that down to maybe 50.

So for this week three I have two extra target goals:

1. Fewer than 50 pickups a day
2. Total screen time for the week < 10h

I’m interested to see how far I can push this because I do believe as a society we have a collective problem with phone usage and I don’t like to be part of problems.