How My Screen Time Dropped by 40% in One Week

Day after day and month after month, sitting at home during this quarantine has driven many of us to spend countless more hours on our devices. With schools and work breaking for the holidays, we have even more free time to sit around scrolling through TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn (you know you’re really bored when you start scrolling through your LinkedIn feed like its Facebook). There was one day last week where I managed to exhaust all of Twitter before realizing I had looked at my phone for 45 straight minutes. Extended battery lives, and extended charging cords, allow us to sit on our devices for longer. And the whole new ‘dark mode’ not only saves power but helps reduce eye strain.

I found that although my days mostly consist of free time, I felt like I didn’t have enough time to actually do anything. I was inspired by many of my readings right here on Medium and Nir Eyal’s Indistractable to start getting my time back.

What I did was turn on Downtime in my settings. I currently have my schedule set to block all unnecessary apps from 10pm to 9am. As an early bird, this 9am was tough for me. On most days, I wake up around 6:30am. So that’s over two hours I spend every morning between when I wake up and when I can access apps like Instagram. What I discovered that probably 50% of my time on social media was spent while lying in bed when I wake up. This really hasn’t changed the amount of time I lay in bed in the mornings (actually, I probably spend less time in bed, but how would I know? I would lose track of time way too easily). However, I now spend that time reading a book or some great articles on Medium. I’ve also found that I crave social media a lot less.

It was frustrating at first, especially not being able to pick up my phone in the middle of the night to scroll through Twitter when I couldn’t fall asleep. But this downtime restriction has actually helped in a lot of ways. I’m not blasting my eyes with bright light from my phone inches away from my face first thing in the morning. And I’ve been able to fall asleep a lot quicker. It’s probably cliche by now to say reading is better for you before you go to sleep, but it’s actually true. I’ve been waking up more refreshed because I was able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. Even though I still have the majority of my waking hours to waste away on social media, I found I’m less motivated to do so.

Starting my day without social media has drastically reduced my drive to continually keep going back to those time-sucking apps. There’s probably some psychology to this but what I know is that cutting off midnight scrolling and spending two hours every morning without social media has drastically changed my habits.

Here’s how I got started:

• I spent some time self-reflecting on the times of day I spent the bulk of single-setting social media use. Not just checking here and there, but the times I found myself spending at least 30 minutes in one go. For me, it was late at night and after I woke up.
• I reflected on my sleep schedule, and I picked what would work best for me. I have this annoying internal clock that kicks on anytime between 6–7am. So, to get 8 hours in, I would need to be asleep by around 11. I picked 10 for my Downtime to start to get at least an hour of screen-free time.
• I headed to settings and turned on Downtime, then set my schedule. There’s an option to set different schedules for different days. I have my weekends set from 10pm to 7am because I really don’t care if I lay in bed for an hour watching TikTok Saturday morning. After all, what else am I going to do! You can select which apps you want to always allow. I basically allowed everything except for my social media apps. Feel free to adjust this for whatever apps are burning up a lot of your valuable time and energy.