Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ben_w 1541 days ago
Second link is broken.

School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would not even remotely surprising during the pandemic — what else are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 was the actual school day.

Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 — memories of downloading and printing pictures from an artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 — but again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200.

Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest in the tasks we had to do.

Of course, now I’m a “responsible adult” or something. Screen Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week:

• Normal office job

• 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic

• 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German)

• Daily practice in at least one other German language app

• A complete audiobook

• A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, YouTube vids, WWDC, etc.

• 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org

• I cook almost all the meals in our household