[pcprincipal]

I've been using Moment (https://inthemoment.io/) for about a year and am really proud of how I've been able to reduce total screen time from 4 hours to 45 minutes per day. Most of the gains were due to deleting Safari and Twitter from my device (Moment breaks down app usage based on battery usage).

To anyone reading this, be aware of how grabbing your phone in the morning to read headlines or Medium digest can turn into 30 minutes or even an hour. Think about how checking e-mails can take you completely out of context and badly dilute the quality of your work. Consider how the amazing small interactions with other people that make life beautiful can be destroyed by even a glance at the phone.

Monitoring phone usage and actively cutting it down I really feel has improved my quality of life. Now that Apple has built in tools to do this, I hope more people will treat this as seriously as they treat exercise, nutrition, etc.

[gnicholas]

I'd be curious to know if reducing your mobile screen time has led to an increase in your desktop screen time. That is, if you're not looking at email on your phone, presumably you look at it later on the computer.

Is it the same for news reading, or do you just read less news these days?

Even if reducing mobile screen time leads to some increase in desktop screen time, it could still be a good thing for social conventions and quality face to face interactions. I'm just curious about whether we're reducing screen time overall, or just shifting it from mobile/interrupted to desktop/purposeful.

[civilitty]

It does lead to an increase in desktop time for me. I've been consciously cutting down on mobile use for HN/reddit/general web browsing throughout the day but I haven't found that I just end up doing it later on the desktop. To the contrary, I end up focusing on stuff far more productive because the desktop is a business/productivity device actually capable of more than rudimentary telecom with a screen bigger than 6.3" (at most). I'd credit that shift for helping me rediscover a love of programming that I thought I had lost a decade ago - all because I could run an IDE and code instead of just reading random blog posts while stuck in an ARM-induced quasi analysis paralysis.

I find that if I end up just playing an online desktop game or putting on the Oculus, the time I spend away from my phone is higher quality and better for my well being overall, even if it replaces something "productive" like answering work emails on my giant (and yet oh so tiny) Note8.

[padobson]

Think about how checking e-mails can take you completely out of context and badly dilute the quality of your work.

I agree with this completely, but the converse is also true. Sometimes you need to switch context during the day, and scanning headlines and reading emails helps me do that (I'm doing it right now!).

The best context switching strategies I've found are eating and meditation, but those aren't always feasible or socially acceptable, so browsing headlines is a good stand-in.

[fjsolwmv]

Surely walking around the building/block is an effective and healthy context switch?

[codethief]

Can anyone recommend an app for Android which does the same thing as Moment and is effective? (Not that I don't know any apps that offer similar functionality but so far none of them has really convinced me / worked.)

[graeme]

Android P is baking it into the system soon. That's probably the best you'll get.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/5/17426922/apple-digital-hea...

[obelix_]

humanetech.com/take-control/

[tcoff91]

RescueTime