I did some hideous maths recently and worked out I spend an average of 30% of my year on my phone… that has to change. I work in social media, I spend a lot of time on my phone, but there’s no way I’ll look back on my life and think, wow, I’m so glad I spent so much time online.
When I took on the challenge to halve my screen time I knew it wasn’t all time spent on social media, I also use my phone for music, staying in touch with friends and family, maps, and photography. Smartphones are incredibly useful and I’m glad to have one to aid my daily life, but they are designed to be addictive, to do it all and remove the need for us to think about so much stuff. But actively using our brains and thinking deeply about subjects is a good thing, we don’t want algorithms to do all the brain power work for us.
My goal was to bring my average daily screen time down from just over 7-hours to 3.5-hours, to rid myself of unneeded time on my phone and give my brain a digital cleansing. I didn’t expect the challenge to go quite as well as it did.
I knew I wanted to do this challenge the week before I actually started it, so you can already see the impact of my screen time reduction. Week one (far left) shows my normal average screen time, which I hate a lot, week two (middle) shows my screen time once I’d looked at the stats for how much time I spent on my phone, this was when I knew I needed to change. Now I actually already halved my phone screen time without thinking too much about it during week two, but for week three (far right), I wanted to really challenge myself to continue this halving of my screen time and go on my phone as little as possible.
In the end I went from nearly 51 hours of time on my phone over a week to nearly 26 hours and then 11 and a half hours in week three. Given I set out to just half my screen time and I ended up neatly quartering it… I’d say this was a success, but what did I learn from this experience?
I don’t need to be online.
I work in social media, it’s my day job and my freelance work and my own business and what I use to promote my wedding photography. It is inescapable for me to not be online, but realising I don’t need to be online has given me the freedom to identify what is work and what is unneeded scrolling and step back and evaluate how I want to spend that time. Every time I pick up my phone, I am making a choice as to how I use my phone and my time and it is the intention behind that choice that I have found makes the biggest impact.
My community is online, through my Patreon and my content creation on YouTube and Instagram, I love that my digital space has allowed me to create and be part of communities with common interests and values to me. Without these spaces I certainly wouldn’t have met half the people I know and have in my life today. I was very aware when reducing my screen time I was also reducing my communication with people who weren’t physically in front of me. As a result of this, I found myself prioritising this communication when I did pick up my phone, so when I was spending time online it was to talk with friends and be involved in my Discord server, which felt to me like a more beneficial use of my time.
The term ‘brain rot’ comes from the lack of choice you have when consuming content provided to you by an algorithm. When you doom scroll on social media and flick from one short-form video to the next you are letting an algorithm pick what you consume and how you spend your time, you are rotting your brain. But if you open social media to specifically look at your favourite creators and actively consume content that adds value to you, you’re going in with an intention and a choice to consume in a way that benefits you. Not to say I won’t still doom scroll from time to time, but I certainly feel the need to less now.
Living in the moment becomes a whole lot easier when you’re looking at what is in front of you and not what is on your phone. In the week of actively trying to reduce my screen time I was reading more, listening to music with more intention, taking photos on my Camp Snap camera that still felt in the moment. I’ve been trying to live a more analogue lifestyle recently where I can and doing this challenge certainly helped me do so.
I’ve found myself noticing a lot more things since looking up from the digital screen in my hand. When I have downtime and want to entertain myself in a low energy way, I’m trying to reach for things other than my phone like drawing, colouring, crafting, reading, music. I’ve even gone as far as to order myself a modded iPod Classic to take my music listening away from my phone too; though I will still be using Spotify, it’s nice to have a phone-free option too.
I’ve watched a lot of long-form content about digital detoxing, reducing phone screen time, dumb phones and I’ve been really interested in learning more about how different people are tackling the digital age we’ve all been thrust into. A lot of younger people are stepping back from social media and smartphones, it’s interesting to see and I’m intrigued to see how this changes in the coming years.
Short form content is here to stay and with it comes shorter attention spans. After just a few short days of doing this challenge I already felt my attention span improving, which I didn’t expect. By removing the instant and short-lived dopamine hit of checking my social media without purpose, I’d given myself more focus on doing the things I actually want to do.
I’m glad I started this challenge because it’s not something I want to stop now. I’m a week out of logging my screen time and trying to keep it low and it still looks similar to the final week of this challenge, I’ve not been exceeding 2 hours a day on my phone. And again, all this isn’t to say we should all stop using our smartphones, they are super helpful devices, but I think we need to be more mindful of how we use them. Our technology should be there to aid and help us, not control us.
