3 Screen Time Metrics You Should Be Checking Regularly

Welcome to The Purpose Memo, a newsletter where I give you ideas for wrestling your life back from digital technology and living a principled life. 

If someone forwarded you this email, join them and other readers here.

Read time: 9 minutes

“We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest of misers.”

Seneca

On April 7th of this year, author and computer science professor Cal Newport released a podcast episode titled “The Forgotten Phone Harms.” Newport has written extensively about the dangers of smartphones and social media in books like Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. He has no social media himself, and perhaps not coincidentally, has written eight books (four of them best-sellers), published a number of academic papers, and achieved tenure at Georgetown University.

He begins the podcast by telling a story about the Los Angeles Angels, a Major League Baseball team. Earlier this year, the organization made a decision to ban all phones from their clubhouse. In an interview between the Angels manager, Ron Washington, and radio personality Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, we’re let in on why the decision was made… and it’s not for the reason you might think.

If you’re like me, you probably incorrectly assumed the phone ban was to limit distractions. But based on Washington’s answers in the interview, that wasn’t the core issue. The decision was about community-building. Successful sports teams need cohesion and chemistry to perform well, and you lose out on a number of team-bonding experiences when phones are in the mix.

This report highlights an important distinction we need to make when discussing the negative impacts of excessive phone use: primary phone harms vs. secondary phone harms.

Primary Harms include declining mental health, elevated stress levels, a perpetual state of distractedness, and “brain rot” from the consumption of ultra-processed content (among other things).

Secondary harms, on the other hand, are the loss of everything else you could be doing with that time. When 30-40 hours of your week are monopolized by scrolling, clicking, watching, and posting (seemingly against your will, at times), the activities you actually care about get pushed to the margins or eliminated altogether.

Understanding this distinction is important if you want to transform your relationship with screens. There are two general strategies at your disposal:

Both are useful; the latter is far more effective. When our enchantment toward life’s possibilities grows, a dissatisfaction with our digital addictions begins to ruminate.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll be sharing the three most important screen time statistics to monitor. If you want to shrink the impact of secondary phone harms in your life, you need to confront the facts.

This will require a little participation, and perhaps, a little humility. Recognition is the first step on the road to change.

Daily Average Screen Time

If you’re an iPhone user, navigate to Settings > Screen Time. It sits at the bottom of the block that includes the Notifications, Sounds & Haptics, and Focus tabs. You can also use the Settings search bar.

Once you enter Screen Time, you’ll see a snapshot of your daily average usage. Select “See All App & Website Activity” for a more detailed look.

Before you keep reading, go ahead and check your numbers. Having real metrics in hand will make this exercise more constructive.

Once you have your number, go ahead and…

(Tip: Round to the nearest 15-minute mark so you can use .25, .50, or .75 on your calculator.)

Jot these numbers down for reference. This is your starting line.

Now, take it one step further. Grab your yearly total from above and multiply it by a reasonable guess of the number of remaining years you have left to live. At your current usage rate, this is how much of your life will be spent looking at your phone.

In the not-too-distant past, my Daily Average Screen Time usually looked something like this:

Doing the calculations above, I get:

And conservatively estimating that I have 40 years left to live, that puts my current-run-rate lifetime-total screen time at 91,250 hours… or 10.5 years.

10.5 years. A humbling reality.

The harsher reality is that recent data suggests American adults spend, on average, around 5.5 hours a day on their phones. The figures above are not an exception. They are typical. And none of our calculations have included time watching TV or using a computer.

Let’s contrast that with my current report. Below is a picture of my real data from last week:

Last week is a good representation of my normal habits. My consumption tends to be about 90 minutes per day.

Here are some reference points if you want to “grade” yourself on your data:

Using the rubric above, l fell squarely in the “Good” bucket last week.

You’ll also notice how none of my apps pose any algorithmically-curated doomscrolling threats. It’s either direct communication with someone (Messages & Phone), music (Apple Music), fitness (Whoop), or podcasts (Overcast).

If you were able to see my old data, you would see X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, ESPN, and potentially Gmail or Slack in my top five.

Reducing your cumulative usage is important; increasing the quality of usage is also important.

If we contrast the two reports, there’s a delta of 70,000 hours over the remainder of my life. That’s almost exactly 8 years.

Ask yourself this:

How much would you pay to add 8 years to your life?

What could you accomplish with four additional hours every day? What about 30 extra hours in your week? What dreams have felt far fetched? What goals have felt out of reach? What unattainable aspirations might become attainable if a genie could magically grant you 28-hour-days?

This is what haunts me about secondary phone harms. We’re watching generations of people operate at 50-60% of their true capacity. The rest is spiraling down a smartphone-induced blackhole.

You have a tremendous amount of creativity and productive energy inside of you that’s begging to be unleashed.

But you’ll have to put your phone down to let it out.

Daily Average Notifications

This is the first of two metrics that few people even know exist, let alone monitor.

Once you enter Screen Time and click on “See All App & Website Activity,” scroll to the very bottom and you’ll find your notification data.

Your notification count answers a very specific question: How many times are you interrupted by your phone throughout the course of your day?

When a push notification comes through, and your phone is with you (which is likely), whatever total devotion currently being given to the activity at hand is immediately fractured.

Before you check, take a guess at your daily average notification count. What do you think it is? 50? 100? 200?

Now go see how accurate you were.

Notifications are tricky because they feel small, almost inconsequential. Yet every notification pulls your attention away from the real life happening right in front of you to some alternate place that is not, of course, right in front of you.

In my experience, notifications are most disruptive in two situations: conversations and focused work. You’re familiar with the feeling of being mid-conversation with someone who glances down at their phone when it lights up, or looks at their wrist when their Apple Watch buzzes. It’s not a good feeling. In a split second, the meaningful bit of beauty found in a human-to-human interaction is lost to the almost certainly less important message on your non-human device.

And nothing kills productive momentum like finding out someone left a negative comment on your post or seeing that shipping is delayed for the toilet paper you just ordered.

For a point of reference, here is my most recent notification report:

I’ve improved on this metric over time, but I have more work to do. 66 notifications per day is about 1 every 13 minutes. Might be time for me to mute a few group texts.

One somewhat obvious point that still bears mentioning is when you put your phone in a drawer for an hour and then return to it later, those 10 notifications you missed lose their ability to rudely interrupt your real life. (Which, I remind you, is their sole purpose.)

Compare your data to these benchmarks:

Pay attention to the source of your notifications. If you can’t make an air-tight case for keeping them, turn them off.

Push notifications should never get the benefit of the doubt. We owe each other the respect of our undivided attention in a conversation. The Michael Scott meme can wait.

Daily Average Pickups

Every time you pick your phone up—whether to check a notification, see the time, look something up, jot down a note, or something else—it’s akin to dropping your mind into a Super Target: you start the journey with good intentions of acquiring one singular item, but you walk out with a cart full of stuff you don’t need.

The app revolution combined with the addition of mobile internet browsing has turned our phones into a never ending network of rabbit trails.

Just yesterday, I was with my four-year-old and decided to check the weather on my phone. When I did, I saw a text from someone about a change of plans happening in a few days, which reminded me to check my calendar, which reminded me of another person I’d been needing to follow up with, and then my train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a “DADDY!” Not because she was being rude, but because she had said my name three times and I subconsciously tuned her out while staring at the glowing rectangle in my hand.

All it took was one seemingly trivial decision and I was instantly transported to somewhere else in the digital ether, a place that was not with my daughter. These little decisions add up. Over time, we become “digital schizophrenics,” developing a distorted sense of our physical reality because of the constant switching from the physical world to the digital one.

You can find your pickup data between the Screen Time section and Notification section. Here’s mine from last week:

I’m disappointed in this result from last week, but excited to work on improving it this week. (Seeing the numbers helps me turn it into a game. I’m highly competitive.)

Take a look at your personal pickup data. See where it fits in these benchmarks:

Regardless of where you land, if are beginning to feel shame, it’s important that you understand this crucial point:

Your excessive phone use is not because you have no willpower. Instead, it’s been wrought by psychology-hacking tech companies with billions of dollars who’s lone objective is to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible.

We did not get here by accident. Our time, attention, and focus have been stolen.

It’s time to take it back.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Digital Minimalism that pinpoints the problem:

It’s about autonomy.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s walk this road together.

Thanks for reading!

One more personal note from me:

As someone who has struggled with phone addiction for a while, I know firsthand the defensiveness that comes with being challenged in this area.

My hope is that this piece would serve as a healthy conversation starter. Not just for you, but perhaps for someone else in your life who cares about personal growth.

Be it a spouse, a family member, or a friend—don’t miss out on a chance to forward this along and invite a meaningful discussion.

See you next week.

PW