Experimental July: Conclusion
I didn't get to write reflections for week three of my July Experiment where I tried to limit my daily screen time. At the end of week four, procrastination kicked in yet again and I thought I'd wait a few more days and write a final reflection post at the end of July. Here it comes.
I'll start off with reports of the screen time from weeks three and four. Spoiler: one of the reasons I skipped the reflection posts was guilt and remorse from not doing so well in sticking to my goals.
The first few days of week three followed the trends of the previous two weeks; averaging about 3 hours each day. Things started going off the rails by Thursday. In the days that followed, my average screen time on my phone shot up to 5+ hours. The main contender being social media apps, whose time limits were manually deleted and I'd either forgotten to turn back on, or ended up removing each day progressed.
Things didn't get better by week four. Or the days after, until yesterday. The average screen time remained around 4 to 5 hours, with that of social media apps contributing 2+ hours of the sum. If July had only 30 days, it would be pretty accurate to say that this experiment has turned out to be a complete failure. Compared to the last weeks of June, the situation did not improve at all.
This morning, I woke up with the desire to implement changes. I know I say this every week but really this time, I thought of much better idea on improving on social media addiction: app passwords.
All attempts to use per-app time limits failed for a very simple reason: the friction to circumventing these self-imposed restrictions were too low. When the time limit was up for the day on an app, a dialogue shows with a button that takes me to the screen time control app, where I can easily hit another button to remove the time limit, and go back to that original app. As it happens, I ended up doing it often, rendering time limits to be completely useless.
As week two proved, that phenomenon became even more negatively significant when the time limit I said was undesirably low, say 30 mins, when I usually spend 1 hour+ on an app. I ended up removing the time limit even earlier in the day, leaving me more time in the day to use the app uncontrolled, without limits. If the time limit were longer, I'd have less time in the day to use the app after the limit was removed. This explained the worsened situation observed in week two.
App passwords increases the friction in opening an app, regardless of whether the time limit was manually removed. I've applied a password to each app I would normally restrict usage for, and used a long password that is easy to make typos on a phone keyboard. This helped.
Today's screen time sits at just about 2 hours, and the usage of social media apps barely reached 30 minutes.
That's a success, and I'll be bringing this strategy with me as we step into August.
Finally, I'll have to reflect on my third goal for July:
- No manually extending any app's time limits
- Daily screen time of 2 hours for my phone
- Opt for a book, podcasts, or writing when I'm about to reach for my phone to procrastinate or "relax"
Clearly, goals 1 and 2 were not achieved. But I'm happy to report that I did satisfactorily well on goal number 3. I finished several books and made good progress on my podcasts and resuming in my writing habits. At least for today, I no longer spontaneously reach for my phone during the fragments of free moments of a day.
Tomorrow will open with a new month, perhaps it's time to reiterate and continue the challenge with more goals? Let's find out.
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