Why I’m Tracking My Phone Use Again (and a free tool to help)
In a world where the average person spends 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phone every day, I’ve been thinking about digital balance again. Back in 2022, I experimented with tracking my phone time through a simple spreadsheet, which was amazingly helpful in helping me become more intentional with my technology use and mindless scrolling.
Recently, though, I noticed my habits shifting, and realised it was a great opportunity to revisit a practice that had served me well. Digital balance, it seems, isn’t a destination, but an ongoing journey of adjustment.
Ongoing Calibration
I’ve come to appreciate that many aspects of wellbeing benefit from periodic recalibration. Just like work-life balance (even though I know there are flaws with that term), nutrition habits, or exercise routines, our relationship with technology naturally shifts with changing circumstances and seasons of life.
I know that that statistic of 4 hours and 37 minutes is not water-tight, and that there are many who would be way over or under that. Nevertheless, it represents a very significant proportion of our waking lives. And while this isn’t inherently good or bad, it certainly raises worthwhile questions about how we want to allocate our limited attention in a world constantly competing for it.
The Power of Data
When I first tracked my screen time back in 2022, I noticed some revealing (and helpfully confronting) patterns. I realised that I was unintentionally spending a lot more time scrolling when I was anxious about something - my time spiked around particularly stressful events. Which meant that, without meaning to, I was reaching for my phone to distract me from uncomfortable or stressful feelings. Which I know enough to know is actually counterproductive. That made me a lot more mindful about how I processed these anxieties.
I also realised that knowing my times were going on the chart was a very motivating circuit breaker for me if I suddenly realised I was mindlessly scrolling! Knowing that every extra minute ‘counted’ and could bump me out of my goal zone was a great positive trigger.
Seeing the hard data of my own habits also made it clear how easy it is to default to connectedness. As William Powers observes in Hamlet’s Blackberry (such a good read! It was ahead of the curve back in 2011 when I read it) -
“Beyond the sheer mental workload, our thoughts have acquired a new orientation. Of the two mental worlds everyone inhabits, the inner and the outer, the latter increasingly rules. The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live… We don’t turn inward as often or as easily as we used to. To be hooked up to the crowd all day is a very particular way to go through life.”
This broader cultural shift helps contextualise individual habits. We’re not just making personal choices - we’re navigating a profoundly shifting attention landscape.
The Value of Focused Attention
Research provides some interesting insights on why managing our digital engagement matters. David Rock explains in Your Brain at Work:
“Employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all… Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible.”
Or as Pico Iyer puts it bluntly in his book The Art of Stillness -
“Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from [an interruption]. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means we’re never caught up with our lives.”
“Which means we’re never caught up with our lives…” I can certainly resonate with that feeling, and I’m sure you can too.
The Opportunity Cost to our Thinking
I’ve noticed this cognitive effect in my own thinking. The difference between a day when I have the opportunity for deep, uninterrupted, flow-state work and a day when I don’t is marked. On days with frequent digital transitions and interruptions, ideas too often don’t have the same opportunity to develop depth and nuance.
Cal Newport’s concept of ‘Solitute Deprivation’, which he discusses in his book Digital Minimalism, is what he describes as -
“a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
This helpfully articulates another dimension to these challenges. It is hard to dispute that there’s something not just valuable, but inherently necessary, about creating space for our own thoughts to emerge and evolve without constant external input.
Making the Template Work For You
It is for all these reasons that when I realised my scrolling had ticked up again, I took myself back to my tracking spreadsheet. I know that when I look back on my life, I don’t want to see an image of myself looking down at my phone. That’s not the story I want to write.
I also know, though, that when it comes to tracking anything, personalisation and purpose are key.
For instance, for me, I’m trying to reduce distracting checking and scrolling. That means I don’t worry about including in my tracking time things that are irrelevant to that - things like screen time accrued because I’m using google maps or listening to audio books while driving. That’s not problematic use time.
When thinking about tracking your own time, consider your purpose and what will best help you move towards that goal—that’s the purpose, not reaching an arbitrary total screen time.
The goal isn’t to minimise all screen time indiscriminately—it’s to be more deliberate about the kinds of usage that tend to fragment my attention or become mindless habits.
When setting up your own tracking, consider:
What specific aspects of phone usage do you want to change?
Which apps or activities feel enriching vs distracting or depleting?
(For instance - for one person, checking email on their phone isn’t really necessary, it’s a habit that isn’t really serving them, since all main replies happen on their computer. For another person who’s on the go all day as part of their role, checking email on their phone is a vital part of their daily workflow)
What time thresholds feel reasonable for your life and responsibilities?
The template includes space to define your own ‘green zone’ (target range) and ‘red zone’ (problem area). These aren’t universal standards, obviously - they’re personal parameters that should reflect your priorities and circumstances. Feel free to go ahead and alter the zones to reflect your own goals.
Practical Tools for Digital Recalibration
As I’ve returned to my tracking spreadsheet, I’m approaching it through a constructive rather than critical lens. This is about giving myself tools and data to help me align my life with my priorities. My highest life goals have nothing to do with scrolling - and in fact can be undermined by it. I’ve always been captured by Johann Hari’s reflection in the exceptional book Stolen Focus -
“I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.”
I believe that line invites us to reflect on what kind of presence we want to bring to our lives and relationships, and how we want to spend our limited time. As Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life -
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
For me, several practical approaches help me approach the investment of my time and attention with more intentionality:
A - Brick
I got one of these devices at the start of the year, and I truly love it. In essence, when you touch your phone to this little square block, it deactivates whatever apps you’ve chosen to include in your ‘bricked’ profile. I have found it much more useful than Apple’s screen time limits feature or turning off notifications. It essentially enables two different versions of your smartphone - one with only essential and non-distracting apps, and one with distracting (but not without value) apps.
B - Environment Design
…or put more simply - sometimes leaving your phone in another room during certain times or activies.
It’s genuinely incredible how powerful just tracking your own habit data can be to shift your patterns. What I’ve found both last time I did it, and this time again, is that once you are aware of the factual data of what you are doing, it creates a consciousness that enables much more effective shifts in habits than simply a general desire to ‘scroll less’. I have found that once I do this, progress isn’t a straight line, but it does become a clear trend line in the desired direction.
Want to Join Me?
As James Williams notes in his excellent book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy -
“In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter.”
If you find yourself curious about your own phone habits and the attention you’re giving it, perhaps it’s a good time for a calibration check.
At the link here you can find the tracking spreadsheet that I use. It’s nothing fancy - just a simple spreadsheet where you can record your daily screen time (per your own parameters) and see your trends visualised. As mentioned, you can adjust the green and red zones to your own targets. Sometimes the most effective tools are the least complicated ones.
On tab one, you can enter your screen time in minutes. On tab two, you’ll see a visualisation, where you can adjust the red and green zones. (I’ve entered three days of example data as an illustration of how you can use the zones).
I’d love to hear your experiences if you decide to try it. What patterns do you notice? What triggers your desire to pick up your phone? What helps you stay present?
After all, this isn’t about digital deprivation; it’s about digital deliberateness. It’s about making sure that we are designing a life that serves our highest priorities.
As the poet W.H. Auden once said -
“Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”