A Sneak Peek at How I Wasted My Week, Courtesy of Screen Time

I’ve glanced at the Screen Time notices (shown above) I’ve been getting every week for a while now, but until just a few minutes ago I had never looked at the details of my weekly report.

And when I finally did take a look, it was kind of eye-opening, disappointing, embarrassing, and frankly, kind of sad.

As the screenshot below indicates, I spent more than 50 hours on my phone in the past week – that’s more than a full-time job! And while it may say that the number one category used was productivity, that’s quite misleading.

Here’s  a breakdown of what apps are classified in the “productivity” category:

And of the 14 hours spent using productivity apps, 12 hours of that was on Google Chrome. And while I do not have the breakdown of where I went on Chrome, my guess is that at least 75% of that time is spent going to my blog statistics; as I said, the numbers are kind of sad…

Here’s a further look at what were my most frequent categories used; as a teacher, it’s kind of embarrassing that education was the least used category – just 19 seconds this past week. Apparently, that resulted from having gone to the space.com website at some point during the week.

I could also break this down by individual apps, as opposed to by categories, this is what that looked like. As noted previously, Google Chrome dominates. The reason for the heavy use of Google Maps was a few trips to New Jersey for the holidays and for a wedding. I guess there were a couple of positive items on the list – one was the use of Polar Beat, which tracks my heart rate during exercise. I took it relatively easy during the past week but still managed to get in almost three hours of cardio. And second was the Kindle reading app, where I’ve been reading The Three Musketeers.

Here’s another interesting stat that Screen Time captures- what is the first app you use when you pick up your phone. No surprise here that it’s Google Chrome, and I’m nearly certain most of the time it’s to check my WordPress blog stats. The Messages and Phone use is kind of obvious as something you would use as your first app; if you get a call or a message comes in, of course you are going to pick up your phone to see who’s contacting you.

The last piece of info that Screen Time provides is where are you getting your notifications from. I am not a heavy user of texting, but as you can see it was the number one source of notifications for the week.

I wish there were more notifications from WordPress, which would indicate that people have liked or commented on my blog. That is one of my goals for the year, to work on the level of engagement I have with my blog. Dave Kanigan gave me lots of good advice a few months ago on how to do so, and now it’s time to start implementing some of those suggestions.

So there it is, a detailed look at how I spent my holiday week with seemingly one of my best friends, my iPhone.

Now I’m curious what a week of Screen Time looks like once I’m back to teaching. Hopefully at that point it will paint a picture of someone who doesn’t spend nearly half his waking hours using his iPhone…