Shortly into the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, the amount of screen time I was spending concerned me. (My teenage son’s screen time concerned me, too, but that’s another story.) Between my expanded workday without commute time on the laptop, active use of my mobile phone for messaging and social media throughout the day, watching TV and movies with family—and alone, while folding laundry—purely leisure use just to fill and kill time at the end of the day (ahem, TikTok and doom scrolling), and a brand new iPad, my screen time had radically increased… and I wasn’t really even sure to what extent.
So I needed to assess that and audit it—oh, researchers...—so I could be fully aware of how much time I was wasting, if I was, and how much of it I could chalk up to reasonable use in a time of relative stress and concern. Luckily, I had a good start already—and some longitudinal data I could include in the audit.
Since January 2019, I’ve used a mobile app called SaveMyTime to keep track of how I spend my time. I log every action, including going to the restroom (AKA “ablutions”) and feeding the cat (AKA “Spooner”). Here’s how the last two years have broken down, excluding items accounting for less than 3% of my time:
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