Screen time report #3
Another week of watching my screen time, and I’m happy to say that it dropped a bit more this past week — to an average of just over 2 hours a day. About an hour of that time is my exercise and meditation time, when I use the phone to track time spent. I’m even happier to say that I believe that I’m breaking the deeply ingrained habit of reaching for my phone whenever there’s what might be called down time in my life. I’d rather think of that time as mind-wandering or day-dreaming time.
I’m taking a further step in phone use this week. I’m going to spend a few days in New York City. This time I’m by myself, and have very few hard-stop appointments where I have to be somewhere at a definite time. I’m going to try making my way about the city without using my phone. There was a time when I was unduly proud of my sense of direction, but I’ve lost that over the last few years. I’m wondering if I can regain a bit of the earlier skill, and I think that NYC is a great place to practice, especially in the part of Manhattan where there’s a regular street grid. Perhaps by the end of my time there I’ll have at least a vague sense of which way is uptown when I emerge from a subway station! It’s worth a try.
I don’t know how long I’ll pay such close attention to phone screen time. As I’ve said before, I really don’t think that screen time is what most concerns me. Instead, what concerns me is the outsourcing of my thinking to a device. I’d rather use it as a tool that helps me do my thinking tasks. If and when I get to that point, then screen time might be an indicator of the thinking and work that I’m doing, rather than of the thinking and work that I’m avoiding.
Week three reports for others in this project:
