It’s a common practice for articles to quote average screen times for different age groups or the “Average American” in order to make a point about our excessive consumption.
Today is day three of our “low consumption challenge” and I’ve had a thought—that number is an absolute lie. It may be technically accurate, but it doesn’t properly reflect the actual time “lost” and the impact intermittent screen use has on our lives.
48 hours into this experiment, there’s one thing I’ve noticed the most: how much easier it is to focus on a single task for longer periods of time. After day one, I stopped picking up my phone (and finding nothing to do on it because I blocked everything).
Instead of reading or watching something while on the couch, I just sat there. I did a Sudoku. I finished random projects around the house. I played with our dog. I drew a face on our Google speaker. My brain just kept coming up with things.
The takeaway is this: we can go into our settings and see that we have two hours per day of average “screen time,” and yes, this demonstrates how much time we’re actually using the phone.
But I’d personally add at least 25-50% to whatever number that says to determine its true effect. The small interruptions impact far beyond the time your eyes leave the screen. Intermittent checks filling the in-between moments with data and videos and texts and emails never allows our brain to process its own data. And there’s a lot of data to process. Probably a backlog from somewhere around 2007 when the iPhone came out.
So don’t let that screen time number fool you—its impact is far greater than the number it reads.