Screen Time: Spending less time online, how, why, and is it worth it?
Graphics: Sóley Ylja A. Bartsch
I use my phone for everything. It is my alarm clock and the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. It is my music, my map, bus timetable, and source of information on the opening hours of the shops. It is my camera, since Icelandic landscapes are beautiful, and you never know when you’ll need a camera. It is how I communicate with all of my friends and family on a daily basis. During the pandemic I’ve also needed my phone to act as a COVID certificate, and to tell me if I’ve been in close contact with someone with the virus. On top of this, I have the usual Netflix, audiobooks, eBooks, YouTube, emails, medical apps, fitness apps, banking apps… the list goes on. I am very embarrassed to admit that some weeks my phone screen time is over eight hours per day, one day in December it was over 16 – but I think that was because I left a video on overnight by accident.
I decided to start the New Year with a resolution I hadn’t tried before. Spending less time on my phone, not no time at all, but less time. With around eight hours per day on my phone, I felt like less time would be achievable, maybe pushing it down to five hours a day.
How?
The first thing I did was look at my screen time for the past few weeks and months, where I had been spending the most time, and what I could do about it. Unsurprisingly, social media and Netflix were the main culprits.
So the next step – how would I limit my phone use? After a lot of time scouring the internet (on my phone) I found the following ideas:
Change your colour scheme to grey - fewer colours means you’ll be less interested in mindless scrolling through social media.
Put an elastic band or hair tie around your phone - this will get in the way of scrolling without impacting your ability to respond to important messages.
Set reminders - some apps, such as Instagram and Facebook have functionalities where they alert you after an allotted period of time.
Delete unnecessary apps - watching Netflix on your phone isn’t that satisfying anyway.
Stop using your phone when you are doing other things (like hanging out with your friends, or watching films, or eating).
Charge your phone away from your bed - this one has multiple benefits as you actually have to get out of bed to turn off your alarm clock if you do this, and once you’re up you’re less likely to go back to bed and scroll through social media.
Why?
You hear all the time that blue light from screens is bad for you, has negative impacts on your sleep, and that it gives you headaches but my main reason for trying to do this was to see if I could and to waste less time. When you wake up at 8 a.m. and don’t actually get out of bed until 11 a.m. because you’ve been on your phone all morning you do start to feel like you’ve wasted a lot of time.
Is it worth it?
There’s no way I will ever give up my phone completely, nor would I want to.
Having everything in one place is definitely convenient, simply because it means I need to buy/bring/pack/carry less ‘stuff’. With my phone I don’t need an alarm clock, nor an iPod, or to worry about carrying my vaccine passport everywhere I go, because it’s all already there.
On top of this, I am a very social person, if my friends are going out to the bar or setting up a study session then I want to be involved, or at least I want to be aware if I’ve been invited so I can decide whether or not I want to be involved. I want to be able to call my family and chat to long-distance friends. So, I will never be the sort of person that can easily just get rid of my phone.
Spending less time on my phone did help me become more ‘present’ though - I was encouraged to actually watch films instead of getting bored and distracted half-way through them, and I think I spent more time chatting to people in person too (I started playing board games with my housemates, which was something I would probably not have had much patience for before this). I’ve also been reading more and getting a little more work done (I am a master procrastinator though, so giving up my phone wasn’t that helpful in this realm).
But I also realised that many hobbies are expensive, Iceland is cold (which limits outdoor activities), and I am easily bored. This experience has highlighted how difficult it can be to find affordable, indoor hobbies, and how much spare time I have outside of work that I’d like to fill with something fun or productive… at the moment I just don’t know what