Screen Time Tracking/Management
In my “What Happened in 2018” post I wrote this:
And the usage of screen time management apps, like Screentime on iOS, is surging. We know we are addicted to tech, we don’t want to be, and we are working on getting sober.
I wrote that based mostly on anecdotal data but we have been looking for better data and have not found it.
So Dani and I worked on a survey that she ran last week and we got these results from a survey of 1,000 adults in the US using Google Surveys:
- 24% use an app to track their screen time.
- 34% of iOS users use an app to track screen time vs 19% of Android users.
- iOS users are twice as likely to use the default screen tracker app than Android users.
- People across age groups are equally likely to use an app to track their screen time.
Here is a graphical representation of that data that Dani put together:
What we don’t know is what these numbers looked like a year ago, but I am fairly confident that we are seeing a surge in the usage of these tools to manage screen time.
We will run this survey again mid-year and again at the end of the year to see if this trend continues.
This is a good trend in my view but it does mean that there is a governor on the amount of usage time that consumers have on their mobile apps and that will make it a bit harder for new mobile apps to gain traction and market share.
It will be interesting to see if usage of mobile apps, including the most popular ones like Instagram, show any signs of slowing down.
Comments (Archived):
Thanks to the two of you for this.Seems possible that as screen time diminishes (mine sure has), refocus on categories of personal development and creativity apps increases.I’m way down on Facebook/Twitter (off my phone), Instagram and way up on meditation, podcasts and audio books already.This year is more about me–what I do and create–and is impacting me being better for others, work and play.My personal trend only of course.
What’s your favorite podcast right now Arnold?Mine is Invest Like the Best. The January 15 episode is Patrick interviewing Michael Duda who’s firm invests in and helps build messaging for consumer brands and using all the modern tools. You might like this episode.
I listen when I’m at the gym and moving around on the subway so about 75-90 minutes a day most times.For politics (a huge junkie):The Daily (NYT)Up First (NPR)NRP Politics PodPod Save America (Vice)The Argument (NYT)Amicus (Slate)Yes a fan of Patrick’s and listen depending on topic.Will listen to it. There is no one topic marketing podcast that is worth anything, I really like some of the deep dive single topic marketing ones on A16 though.Laura Shin (Crypto)Unchained/UnconfirmedA16 seriesGreat stuff in here cross a bunch of genres.Off Chain (crypto)Fresh Air (cross topics)oh andKannaboomers for Cannabis/CBD worldAnd at timesDave Asprey/BulletProof RadioWelleness Hacking.So many.I follow my mood.SORRY–more than you asked for.
Wow. Thanks Arnold.
hope you find some new stuff in there.always looking for new stuff in the arts, design and geeking wellness especially in the cbd world.
What screentime apps for iOS would you (or anyone) recommend? I like the default iOS one, but would like to have the possibility to see developement over time, to compare weeks/days … But maybe I am not yet using all features that it has?Thank you for this …
Another good question — what apps do you have on your phone? I’ve been seeing tweets about people removing Twitter from their phones, wouldn’t call it “trending” but definitely a new sentiment.
By addiction theory they will simply replace that with something else equally as bad.Separately not that I use twitter (I don’t) but in the end it’s entertainment. As such it’s no better or worse than other forms of entertainment.
Lol, that seemed to be the reason Fred and Dani are looking at this, though — what might it be replaced with?
Ha! Watch a demographic group teens/seniors they will tell you all you need to know.
You mean survey wise? If the data is important and if you get paid to vet ideas then maybe you should be more rigorous in how you collect data and not go for the easiest and cheapest way to do it perhaps?Back during college I worked for Coldwell Banker who was opening up their first East Coast office for commercial real estate. They hired college students whose job it was to drive every single street and identify every single commercial building and call every single tenant and build a database of all the properties. In the entire SMSA.In the ‘calling’ phase (after initial data collection) you don’t know how many times I was told by someone ‘oh this already exists you just buy XYZ directly it’s all there!’. But CB didn’t want that data. They wanted their own data and they were willing to pay to collect it by employing 10 students for the entire summer. Not the easy or cheap way. And they did that in multiple cities also.Fred is not into nuance from what I can tell. He has been successful like many investors by more or less not looking at details or granularity. Now maybe that isn’t the case since it is just based on what I read here. But it is a typical finance and investor way of looking at things. Nothing wrong with that but much of business does not operate that way it comes down to the better mouse trap sometimes.
Agree it’s entertainment. But for some it’s great for business insights too. For the content producing side of our business, I can drop the “fishing pole” into twitter for 30 minutes and produce 10 good ideas to pass on to our team. We are following the right people to be able to do that…
honestly twitter and linkedin are informative but they are work networks and i manage them as such.not entertainment at all to me as instagram is but with twitter of course its a content feed for a number of topics that matter to me in the tech world.
I removed twitter – not because of addiction (way overused term) – but annoyance.
Me too, a while ago. I wouldn’t call my relationship with twitter “addiction,” but I have been known to scroll mindlessly. Not having it on my phone means that it won’t happen as often…
Most folks want to be exactly where they are, there is no addiction. It’s only the elitists who believe they don’t want to be there.
I have twitter (and a bunch of other social apps) on my phone but only because I monitor accounts for my clients and like that I can access it from my phone if I’m not at my desk. I quickly scroll through notifications on my phone to assess whether there is a need to respond or notify a client of a problem. To me, they are just tools that I just use to do my job.
Brava! You are made of better material than me. I often found myself using small moments of time — like standing in line for coffee — engrossed in my feed rather than what was actually happening around me. tbh this still happens when I use Twitter on my laptop…
hahaha! I do that sometimes. But I also am a super busy person so I’m fairly regimented about my time and what things I want to accomplish.I have a friend who contacts me from time to express his fascination that I post “firebombs” on Facebook then walk away and never respond to all the people fighting with each other over it in the comments. Sometimes I go back and read all the crazy things people said but usually I just leave it there.The best part is that I’ll be out at a social event and people will come up to me and start talking about some interesting thing or another that I posted on Facebook. It’s been my experience that social media leads to interesting interactions in real life.
You are not alone. I’ll give you an example. I had to take my daughter to the yarn store. I looked around as she was shopping at their classes, their spinning wheels, and their looms as well as the fact I didn’t know you could buy yarn from so many countries.They are in my town but people travel from NYC to WAS to buy there it is always busy. I am amazed. https://vulcansrest.com/The owner came up to me and we had a long chat. She asked if I was interested in taking up knitting or weaving. I told her no not really my speed, but I was fascinated by her USP and the fact that she had to move out of the center of town (which is why I had to drive my daughter) to expand and accommodate all of the cars.She said she gets tons of men (sorry not too many of us knit) that bring a spouse but all they do is bury their head in the phone either in the car or sitting on a bench she has. What a shame. Peruvian vegetable dyed yarn? Who knew?
Ah, neat! I love a store like that — it looks wonderfulIf you haven’t seen one, ask your daughter to show you a knitting pattern: it’s actually code!
And some say the loom was precursor to the first computer: https://mccarlgallery.wordp…She has. And people try and get me to try but in addition to not having the patience my fingers are so thick you can put nearly put a quarter through my wedding ring and they have been broken so many times I have lost count.If you want a lid taken off or me to crack walnuts while we sit I’m your man. Knitting, not so much. But yes, they love to show me at Vulcan’sIt’s just like if I took you to the range people will love to accommodate people from outside the traditional stereotypes if you show interest. This I believe.Our Lego league team won first place yesterday in the qualifiers. 60% female, 20% “white” Coaches….well we all look like me. But it will change.
Congratulations!!! on your win. And no need to knit, it’s not for everyone. Hopefully you’ll be the recipient of a many beautiful handmade works by your daughter.
As much as I spend on yarn I certainly hope so 🙂
Lol, I hear you. It is not an inexpensive undertaking.
Knitting? I have never done it. But I have observed others who do and of course have an opinion on it (as always).So knitting is not like firing a gun. It is more like mowing a lawn.Why? Because knitting is what I will call a ‘zone’ activity. It’s something that doesn’t require thinking and can be done on autopilot. It’s something where you make progress and you end up with something that is a viewable product. It seems to be something that provides value. As such it makes you feel better about yourself than if your zone activity was watching TV. Also others will think positive about you because it is so pure and wholesome.Everyone likes zone activities because they are a great way to pass time. Plus you (again) appear to be productive in some way. So it creates a positive feeling.Zone activities are good for lots of people but really good for people with depression.I first noticed all of this back when I worked for my Dad and typed invoices. That was a total zone activity. Much better than doing inventory in the warehouse. That is where I started to formulate this theory actually.
OK, but so What? Namely,- Are we changing our behaviors based on seeing this data? That would be a good follow-up question to consider.
Thank you Dani & Fred. As suggested by @annelibby and @SixgillBlog it would be great to try and get more info from the ones that already use screen time tracking (eg avg daily hrs and 3 most popular apps).
The irony of using an app to track/manage screen time.Maybe I am out to lunch here, but broadly I don’t get this focus in the tech world upon such tools to improve life. Like using a sleep app to measure quality of sleep. A simple and direct measurement of your sleep quality – how refreshed and energized you feel when you wake up, how easily you can fast for the next 8-10 hrs after waking up.p.s.Yes, I know the business maxim that you don’t manage what you don’t measure.
Because there is a clear problem/challenge that people have identified and I think we’re already starting to see a backlash that could lead to some extreme actions (like quitting FB) and all things being equal getting out in front of the backlash will hurt business and business value less than waiting for either an extreme social reaction or having regulation inflicted upon industry by government.
(like quitting FB)I am typically not a fan of managing by ‘cold turkey’. I think you need to learn to control yourself w/o something drastic.Here is an example with Facebook. I rarely use it but I decided right off that I would never post and/or comment on Facebook. I figured that once I did I would then have a hard time stopping. This is exactly the logic that I used back in high school when I refused to even try pot. People said ‘oh try it you might like it’. I said ‘exactly that is why I am not trying it’.Now anyone reading might think that I am contradicting myself. ‘You say control yourself but then you say don’t try it at all how is that control?’.It is control. It’s recognizing when something might be addictive and should be entirely avoided vs. being able to modulate your emotions and reactions to be able to have a little ice cream w/o eating the entire container. Or being in the presence of people who smoke and being able to resist trying it.
Oddly enough, FB maybe better than allocating time to msnbc, Fox, cnn ? It’s all – bad – entertainment ? Look at the moron Keith Oberman’s career. It’s all an act. How many decades was mid day soap opera run ?
Investment thought:Re: extreme actions, like quitting FacebookSome people have quit Facebook for sure. I still see lots of people who know the issues, yet shrug and still use it- a lot. Because everyone they know is on there. Then there are the people who seem unaware of the issues amazingly.I’m curious if their pace of ad price growth and the new Instagram revenue contributions will swamp the problems ( to the positive on earnings); or just keep them even.The stock price suggests people are unsure.Reading Modern Monopolies right now (of which Fred is quoted), fantastic book discussing all styles of two-sided markets. Powerful.It will be interesting to see how the Facebook monopoly plays out.
but broadly I don’t get this focus in the tech world upon such tools to improve lifeSame here. Essentially tools to help weak people, no? Or better gimmicks to provide motivation where you should just buckle down and be self motivated. Maybe that is what someone should do. Learn to do something w/o some crutch or aid or enhancement. Stop looking for the shortcut or the answer.Funny I had recently bought an Apple watch for a guy who does work for me (as a side job) as a holiday gift. I bought the same v4 Apple watch but didn’t have time to even unbox it yet (it is still unboxed like a month later I just use v1 for now). Anyway he tells me ‘oh wait to install it in the morning that way you can get the rings for the day!’. Rings? What is that some kind of annoying thing that keeps you motivated to keep up your movement? I don’t need that. I am moving all day just because I am moving all day. I don’t need some watch to tell me I have to get up. In fact in v1 I turned off that annoying feature. How about common sense? Put the laser printer in the outer office (what I have done) so you have to get up every time you print something (yes some of us still use and like paper..)This particular person is very overweight. Honestly thinking a watch will solve a problem that is probably both medical and emotional is really going to far. You see this on hacker news a great deal. They talk about some fad diet or method as (I always like to say) ‘the answer’ to the problem. Fact is people are different. Sometimes you just have to put in a massive effort on your own to fix something w/o relying on some crutch that you think will get you there.
Ties to my question about whether users actually change behavior or do something differently based on seeing this data.I’ve looked at my data, then shrugged at it.
There was a video Fred shared about a week ago. An interview with Marc Andreessen. In that interview, he mentioned an example of how tech tools may change and save lives in the future. He talked about heart disease (#1 cause of death in the U.S.) and mentioned some stats (higher rates of survival and damage mitigation if you are at hospital vs not at hospital. Basically, each minute counts.) He indicated that there are already tech tools & apps being used that, eventually, will be able to predict if someone will have a heart attack and notify that person to get to the hospital. I see these kinds of uses highly beneficial, however, they also are in their infancy so it’s hard for people to imagine why/how basic, siloed data collection will have a future benefit. The change toward those advanced technologies will be incremental, not instant, which is why it’s so hard to understand the value now.
Someone like Marc would probably think it’s great to spend all sorts of money being able to handle healthcare for every single edge case even if the cost to society was enormous and perhaps was taking away from something of higher value that benefited everyone. It’s the old ‘what if it was a member of your family!!’ that gets people on board with this thinking.There is not an unlimited amount of money to be spent on healthcare especially because it further encourages (in some cases) people to do reckless things with their health because they know there is a safety net out there to save them (an example might be narcan). [1] Or eating my favorite example. All the crap food that people overeat (especially poor people) fried this and fried that high fat comfort food.How much is enough is my point? Healthcare cost is already a huge drain on society. Part of the reason is business (and pharma) coming up with new incremental ways to extend or save life. Now I know everyone will have a problem with this (under the ‘what if it was you or a loved one’) but it’s unfortunate and we have to realize that all of this costs money and a reason we are spending so much on healthcare. Back in the 80’s? Was reasonable honestly very reasonable.Other thing is this with business and pharma. Take away one revenue source and they will find another way to make money. (Like bag fees and airlines). Pharma ran out of their blockbuster drugs so they then came up with niche drugs that are super expensive (and advertised all over TV I am sure everyone has seen them) to treat things that are not even life threatening. Like skin conditions and rashes. Great entertaining commercials.This is one of my favorites about 30 seconds in ‘meet the parents’ it’s really cute actually.https://www.ispot.tv/ad/dtv…[1] And prior to narcan there were opioids. In other words ok to be reckless and hurt yourself because medicine is there to save you and put you back together again, right? For some reason I doubt that 200 years ago people took as many reckless chances as they do today with their health (don’t mean food, they didn’t know about that I mean just things where you might have some injury that couldn’t be fixed by drugs or surgery..)
200 years ago opiates were alive and well. Just look at the romantic age in England.
I know many who swear by them though.Just bought an Oura Ring for for someone for just that sleep monitoring.Also if curious, I am a fan of the work of Nichol Bradford who is really pioneering the Transtech space.https://www.linkedin.com/in…Yes–I’m a geek obviously at the intersection of tech and wellness.
You will have to explain the fasting thing to me.But I agree and will go further. I watch people literally go nuts trying to manage their “numbers” Numbers is in quotes. Your numbers and my numbers might be different but that is fine.They worry so much about their numbers all of the time that the actual result is worse than if they didn’t measure them.Let me give an example. I will tell you the best way to get over jet lag is to be willing to lay awake in bed and not worry that you are awake, just think you are only getting half the amount of sleep time that you would if you were asleep but half more than if you get up and work.There cannot be anybody on this board that has not had their mind racing and not be able to sleep. I cannot imagine compounding that by worrying what an app says about your sleep.
While I have never viewed “screen time” as an issue for me, I have noticed many people that seem to struggle with phone addiction. Many people in my age group are leaving social media, cease to post, and/or are deleting their profiles. This is leading to a death spiral in the utility of social media. I no longer use it to keep up with friends as much.
I’m tasked with managing the screen time of my 3 teenage daughters. And let me tell you. It’s an impossible task. I’ve used paid apps, free apps and now iOS native screen time. You’re fighting against an unstoppable force, namely pester power. That for me is a more lucrative market than self-restraint induced screen time management which just use apps as data provider. We need powerful configurable non-hackable tools. Screen addiction amongst teens is a real mental health and time sink issue. And a workable solution does not yet exist. Trust me. I’ve tried them all.
Check your router. It almost certainly has the ability to block access by either website or entirely with the mac address of the device they are using. You can cut them off that way (time wise or entirely). If your router doesn’t do this for some reason you can simply do the following:1) Buy a router that does2) Change the pw on the existing default router (so they can’t connect to it)3) Give the kids the pw to the new router (which can be hooked up to the existing router obviously so you keep the old router.4) Program the new router to limit their access during the timesyou will allow. They get the new pw to that new router and don’t know the pw to the old router.Make sense?
parentkit.co was not effective for you? could you elaborate on the problems you faced if you used it?
Go to the library and get some books.
Amazon-Kindle. Does it count as screen time?
As long as the information is in a longer form. Makes us think differently.
.Unlimited Kindle is worse for me than any drug. I like reading history that makes me think.You are perfectly correct that longer form works can make us think.I have just begun re-reading everything that Churchill wrote, which is a lot of stuff.He wrote 43 full length books in 72 volumes during his life — 1874-1965.I thought I had read a lot of his stuff — I had — but I had no idea how much he wrote.There is a series of speeches he wrote, “Liberalism and the Social Problem” that is worthy of a good read as it pertains to today in the USA. Very apropos.Some of his books can only be found in Kindle format — Arms and the Covenant/While England Slept 1938 is clairvoyant.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Tom Rick,’s “churchill and orwell” a great read. Just finishing.
.Looks like a fabulous book. I will read it. Thanks.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
What’s the best calendar app for iPhone?
I care about this because my “addiction” is considered a bad influence for my grandchildren, according to their parents. My daughter decreed her home as a no fly zone, at my son’s they have well delimited “iPad time”.My defense is that children must be prepared for the world they will live in, not an utopic version of the world in their parents’ heads.Content is 10X more important than exposure in my opinion and, for the case of adults, attention interruption is more relevant than time. How many times you were interrupted by your device, alert, etc. I found myself being interrupted by other people (calls, texts) through the devices than the devices themselves. There is an interesting metric in iOS screen time app, “pickups”, that I also think is important.
.I even have to negotiate Elmo time with My Perfect Daughter.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
As anyone who suffered through NYC public schools; it’s the content stupid. If your granddaughter was watching YouTube to help her learn to plant her first flower, time would have unknown demensions.
.Brilliant child, though only just turned one. She was working through calculus and nuclear physics with Elmo.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
it is not just the content. for kids under 2 almost all screen time is bad. for those older, if screen time is adversely impacting eye contact and oral conversation — which it probably is if usage is high — it’s going to be a real hindrance to developing emotional intelligence and self-control.
I think the survey is biased toward a certain type of user. I find it really hard to believe that 25% of the genpop uses an app to track their time. If you look and try to find how google runs these surveys you get this:https://marketingplatform.g…Your questions live across a network of popular sites and within our mobile app. Here, people answer your questions for access to premium content and Google Play credit.Consequently it’s not 1000 random adults but 1000 adults who happened to be motivated by the incentive that google is offering. I have run into cases where to access a story on a shit local site I have to answer a few questions. Take a guess as far as how much effort I (or others) put into the right answers when you are impatient and just want to get what you came for in the first place. Amazing that google gets .10 per completed survey (or more).Next time you do this at the same time do a completely made up survey. Invent something that doesn’t even exist and see what kind of results you get then.People across age groups are equally likely to use an app to track their screen time.This alone makes no sense.
It’s like tracking people if they have downloaded a hiking Ap? Or a MOOC app.
We think too much alike. I thought this survey must be biased.
Ha! The only thing that effects screentime today is battery life? What makes you think an app to monitor your time has anything to do with even the desire of reducing screen time? If you are on your screen today using an app to count your screen time, it’s not likely to have any effect or likely have anything to do with reducing your next day time you are with screen.
with the backlash against Facebook, Snapchat has an opening if only they would see it, execute and drive through it.
Match Group price right now is 48.00 bucksSnap ~ 5.00 bucks
Small suggestion maybe sometimes useful: If graph some data, then clearly state what question is being addressed and what answer to the question comes from the graph. That is, don’t just present the graph and leave to the reader to figure out the intended question and answer. Not always necessary but at times helpful.Then for a second step, with the data in the graph, do an actual statistical hypothesis test to add support for the answer. Again not always necessary but at times helpful.For such a test, consider two treatments, e.g., workers, drugs, software development techniques, etc. For more definiteness, consider two calculus teachers. After the courses, the students take a standardized test of calculus knowledge. For each of the two teachers, average the scores for their students. Gee, Ma, usually the averages are not exactly the same!!!Question: Is one of the teachers better than the other?So, maybe each teacher had 20 students. So, in total we have 40 students. Program an electronic automatic confuser machine to pick 20 students at random (in more detail, want independent and uniform on the remain students to be picked — could add more details, but that is likely not necessary here) so that now have two sets each with 20 students. Average the scores in each set and get the difference. Do this, say, 10,000 times. Build a histogram, i.e., get the empirical distribution of the 10,000 differences. See where the actual difference is in the histogram.More intuitive approach: Put the 40 test scores in a bucket. Stir the bucket vigorously. Pull out 20 of the scores and average them. Average the remaining 20. Write down the difference in the two averages. Repeat 10,000 times, maybe only 500 if start to get tired.Answer: If the actual difference is out in a 1% tail, then either (A) the two teachers are the same and we just observed a difference in the averages that should happen only 1% of the time or there is a difference in the teachers.This is called a two sample test. Since the test makes no assumptions about probability distributions, it is distribution-free. In particular, since the test does not assume a probability distribution that has some parameters, such as mean and variance for the Gaussian distribution, the test is non-parametric.There are lots of two sample tests. This test where we resample the data is close to the work of B. Efron and P.. Diaconis, both now long at Stanford.What is going on here mathematically deserves some more work, but for me that’s on a back burner or not even in the kitchen.Some people might regard such a test as really smart, as intelligent, and, thus, artificial intelligence (AI), but it would be ugly, with no good reason, to so insult such nice, traditional statistics by calling it AI. Why be so really nasty??
Here is how I think most people view tracking their activities: I hit my fitness (or whatever area of improvement) goal for the day (or whatever goal) so now I can cheat (e.g. have wine).See: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog…I‘ve only experienced success using tech tools when they extend an activity I already do or a goal I am already working towards For example, I used to run a certain amount of miles in a time based on a Google maps estate and looking at my microwave clock as I walked outside (I don’t run on treadmills or run with my phone). After doing that for so long, I bought a GPS running watch to more accurately gauge lap times, pace and certain other training techniques like running negative splits. After a few years of that, I bought the heart rate monitor chest strap to better track my sprint workouts. I use the watch and heart rate monitor 90%+ of the time because it’s a natural part of my training.I think using some tracking tool fails because it’s part of a massive change in behavior (couch to 5k or stopping phone addiction) and there are too many other more importAnt things to focus on. Precise tracking is only useful at the margins
Much of the difference here can be explained in how fast the respective user bases adopt the latest OS version.Whereas most iOS users have the latest update within weeks, most Android users won’t for years, because of the piecemeal way in which the operating system gets adopted by device makers. As of September 2017, less than 0.1% (basically just a portion of Pixel devices) were running the latest version (Pie), and only 25% were currently running the previous version released in summer 2017 (Oreo).https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mo…https://developer.android.c…If you’re a developer in digital wellness space, Android is a wide open playing field. Especially since Apple is starting to kick these apps out of the App Store, and Android simply offers more degrees of freedom to get creative.https://techcrunch.com/2018…
Much of the difference here can be explained in how fast the respective user bases adopt the latest OS version.Whereas most iOS users have the latest update within weeks, most Android users won’t for years, because of the piecemeal way in which the operating system gets adopted by device makers. As of September 2017, less than 0.1% (basically just a portion of Pixel devices) were running the latest version (Pie), and only 25% were currently running the previous version released in summer 2017 (Oreo).https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mo…https://developer.android.c…If you’re a developer in digital wellness space, Android is a wide open playing field. Especially since Apple is starting to kick these apps out of the App Store, and Android simply offers more degrees of freedom to get creative.