📲 Your ScreenTime vs Happiness: The Surprising Correlation
TL;DR: Spending too much time on my phone each day made me unhappy, so I controlled my screen time to make more time for the things I love.
Yesterday I noticed I wasn’t feeling particularly happy. I also noticed I was using my phone a LOT. I quickly checked out the ScreenTime app on my phone. It had some shocking numbers for me. 8 hours 30 minutes on screens! If you keep aside 8 hours of sleep that’s more than 50% of my day spent on screens — scary.
I also went back to a time I was on vacation — when I felt much more happy and relaxed and checked the screen time: a maximum of 2 hours on any given day.
This got me thinking — could our happiness be related to screen time? If yes, could there be a way to control our happiness by controlling our screen time?
Before I tried to control my screen time — I set about trying to figure out why I needed screens so much. The Screen Time app came in handy again. A cursory look at the statistics painted an interesting picture:
The biggest culprits? Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter (X) and Kindle. On the worst days — 2 hours, sometimes 3 hours on Insta and X. But why was I spending so long on these apps?
Instagram: My first post on IG was a blurry photo of the neighbourhood where I lived in high school. Since then, Insta has become the main way I keep in sync with the lives of my friends all over the world. But it’s also where I find talented new musicians to support through my new venture.
Twitter (X): As a self-proclaimed crypto bro this is where a large part of my professional (and personal) life lives. Keeping up with the latest drama on CT (Crypto Twitter) and getting motivated by all the cats, apes and frogs in the cryptozoo. But is also where I spend time on marketing and community building for CommunityBuild.xyz and Something-X.com
Whatsapp: The home of family groups and friends like family groups, local startup communities, and now some of my work-related communities (although Telegram takes care of most of that). With WhatsApp, I also feel a compulsive urge to ‘Read All Messages’ so this results in me checking it quite often.
Kindle: I try to read one book each week so there are days when Kindle takes more than 4 hours which by itself is not an issue for me, but reading on my phone leaves me prone to a barrage of notifications that do end up pulling away my attention and time.
Apart from all of this, I do want to spend a lot of time writing too — but doing this on my device causes the same distraction issue. I have the same issue with tracking tasks and productivity on my phone.
Now that I clearly understand why I spend so much time on this suite of applications, it’s time to think about how I can control my time on them. To do that, it’s important to understand what my limits are. Different people may set varying limits for themselves basis the kind of work and life they live.
For me: I’d like to keep screen time to a maximum of 3 hours per day. Now that I know my upper limit, I can go about distributing this screen time across the day while still achieving my objectives.
While the Screen Time setting does allow for time limits to be set on these different apps, I feel my discipline is not strong enough to adhere to them and I’ll end up overshooting time. So l settled on a different approach: predetermine the times of the day I would be using these different applications.
This is the split-up of the 3 hours I settled on:
Instagram: 1 hour per day
30 minutes for catching up with my friends’ lives and sharing a little bit about mine.
30 minutes for work-related activity — be it posting a promotional reel and running ads or cold DMing musicians.
Twitter (X): 1 hour per day
30 minutes on my personal account for catching up with messages and notifications, digesting the latest drama on CT and sharing my hot takes on it (or something personal)
30 minutes on my professional account, planning and posting or interacting and supporting accounts we follow or care about.
Whatsapp: 1 hour per day.
30 minutes for chilling with my family and friends, seeing if there’s any help I can do or reaching out when I need help.
30 minutes for catching up with work-related communities and adding value there.
I tried to spread these 3 hours throughout the day so I’m not using my phone for long stretches. Feels like a good system — but what do l do with the rest of my day? And is it possible those other activities will end up requiring more screen time?
1. Pet my Gotchis:
I play this Tamagotchi-style game called Aavegotchi where I need to pet my Gotchis once every 12 hours and harvest my land parcels. I find this quite therapeutic and since it is not super screen intensive I am okay with the extra screen time.
2. Reading:
I do most of my reading on a Kindle and this does add to the screen time. While I love the convenience of e-reading, I am going to switch to physical books or audiobooks when possible.
3. Watch the Sunset:
*Marked Safe From Screens*
4. Workout at the Gym/Play a Sport:
*Marked Safe From Screens*
5. Writing:
While writing on a device is so much easier, I’ll use pen and paper and later scan it for publication online. (Grammarly is getting annoying anyway). If I do have to write on a device, I’d ensure internet connectivity is kept off. I’m also curious if something like reMarkable would work for me.
6. Preparing for the activities I need to do during my allotted ScreenTime:
This includes:
→ Planning the required content needed
→ Figuring out the strategy to be used
→ Executing the strategies
While the execution might require screens, I feel most of the planning and strategizing can be done over pen and paper or conversations. For the execution, invest in automation tools that can claw back some precious screen time for you.
If I successfully execute everything above, that gives me a massive bonus of 4 hours each day to do more of what I love. How would I spend this time?
- Play my guitar and sing more: I love music, I’d spend at least one hour simply jamming and making new music. Recording and producing this music would add to my screen time, but I’d try to keep to an offline process.
- Enjoy more of nature and the outdoors: (Even if it’s man-made creations like malls) but be physically present wherever l am. l considered becoming an influencer to give these visits some sense of purpose when I go on my own but that would again add dangerous amounts of screen time.
So that covers most of my ambitious plan to free myself from the clutches of screens. I have no idea how this will work out and if it will even have a positive effect, but gotta give it a shot right? I hope some of this helps you folks live a better life too!
🍵 P.S. I made this unique Accountabili-tea system that helps me plan my daily schedule according to these screen time limits and stick to it, share this article and DM me if you wanna get your hands on it :)
