With Screen Time, you can access real-time reports showing how much time you spend on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or iPod touch. You can also set limits for what you want to manage. Screen Time lets you know how much time you and your kids spend on apps, websites, and more. This way, you can make more informed decisions about how you use your devices, and set limits if you’d like to.
Justin Pot for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple says it launched Screen Time in 2019 to help people forge a better relationship with their devices. Your phone tracks how much time you spend tapping away, further divided by how much time you used other specific apps and sites. And each Sunday morning, by default, you receive a push-notification pointing you to a detailed report of what you did with your phone over the last week.
You can use this data to set yourself soft limits with any given app or category of app. Want to spend less than 4 hours a day on Twitter? A noble goal! Try setting your time allowance for the app to 2 hours. Once you’ve racked up 120 Twitter minutes, you’ll be sent a prompt saying you’ve hit your “Time Limit.” You can take the cue to put your phone down, snooze the notification for 15 more minutes or recklessly dismiss it for the rest of the day.
Advocates of Apple’s Screen Time insist it provides crucial information about your habits that can help you change them… A common complaint about the weekly Screen Time report is that checking it inspires little but anxiety. Breetel Graves, 34, a support engineer in Canaan, Conn., with two children, says social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram offer what she sees as necessary downtime in her chaotic life. The amount of time she spends “zoning out” with diverting posts already provokes guilt, she said, and getting a weekly report via an invasive push notification only makes her feel lousier. “I spend enough time shame-spiraling about it all on my own,” she said.
MacDailyNews Take: Do you find Apple’s Screen Time reports useful?
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Being an old retired guy with no family I have no use for it. Reminds me of an old poster I saw a long time ago. It was an old west era Indian saying “White Man Crazy, White Man Look at Watch to see if Hungry”.
More noise. I ignore them, or otherwise have them not show up. I suspect for those with kids, they have a lot more value.
No, they aren’t. If you can’t put your phone down for more than five minutes, no app on earth is going to help you unless you can put your phone down for five minutes. I predict that in the future phone addiction will be right up there with heroin addiction, and Silicon Valley does this with great intention (partly due to the fact that in the millennial age, they are all victims of it, no heroin addict thinks they have a problem); college classes on UX are basically all about making this an ever prevalent thing, to an increasingly insidious degree, and that was not at ALL the point of the web 30 years ago. But Apple, dang if they don’t need to keep making money. :/