A review of my screen time

As technology advances, people now tend to spend a lot of time with it, especially on their devices like smartphones and laptops. This wasn't the case many years ago when there weren't Android or iOS phones, and also back when laptops were very expensive. I can remember the time when the popular phones were those Java phones with terrible Internet connection and very little storage of just around 100MB, people barely spent time on their phones because the most they could do with it was make calls, send text messages or listen to radio.

BlackBerry devices were the beginning of the madness we are seeing today, and since then social media has improved tremendously and most people now have access to it. Before now, I spent most of my time on social media (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) until I realised I could utilize the Internet to learn a skill and earn money for myself. These days, I spend most of my time watching tutorial videos on YouTube and online courses from udemy and edx platforms. Those are mostly what make up my screen time for today which you can see in the picture below.

Yikes! 😬 That's a lot of screen time. I woke up around 7 AM today and the time I took that screenshot was around 7 PM this evening, that makes it 12 hours and my screen time is almost 10 hours. You know what's even worse? The time I spend on my laptop isn't part of those 10 hours, that is just my screen time on my phone. I usually use my laptop and phone together because I'm mostly watching tutorial videos with my phone while carrying out the steps on my laptop. But there was a period when I put away my phone and fully focused on a project on my laptop, and that was for over an hour.

So, 10 hours on my phone and 1 hour of isolated usage of my laptop, brings my total screen time to 11 hours (in a 12-hour period). Ok, that's actually too much and I just realized it now 😅 that's usually the amount of time I spend on screen every day, considering I barely leave the house and my life mostly revolves around coding and Hive. The funny thing is that the career path I'm currently on is one that requires a lot of time staring at screens, and that's software engineering. Computers are basically our workplace/office, just as how the workplace of doctors is a hospital.

Now the question is; how do I know that I have enough screen time? Honestly, I don't know. I don't get any indication or effects that tell me that I'm spending too much time on screen, as some people might start feeling headaches or itchy eyes but that doesn't happen to me. I guess the one thing that helps is that I don't actually spend very long periods looking at screens, I take short bursts of breaks from time to time. It's like a habit I subconsciously developed, after I have used my laptop or phone for some hours, I take a walk around the house for some minutes and maybe talk with my sisters for a while (on those days when I'm not home alone).

I can't actually be looking at screens for a long duration like 4 hours, within that time I must have taken around 20 minutes of break. It might seem small but it totally helps. Sometimes the break might just be me standing in my corridor and looking at people walking on the road or cars driving by. Some other times I just walk around the house looking for something to snack on😅 and those breaks usually involve drinking lots of water. Another thing that also helps is that at night, I use the eye care feature on my phone and laptop to reduce the blue light they emit.

On some phones it's called night mode or blue filter, it's just a feature that gives your screen a yellowish tint. It's much better than the usual blue light because it's easier on the eyes and helps you sleep better (blue light makes it harder to fall asleep). I usually have around 6 to 7 hours of sleep every night, which is a good improvement to the years when I slept an average of just 4 hours. My screen time during that period was extremely high and I noticed I had lots of headaches during the day. But since I have been using this pattern of short breaks at regular intervals and my phone's eye care feature at night, my screen time doesn't affect me that much anymore.

Thanks for reading

Connect with me on:
Twitter: @kushyzeena
Readcash: @kushyzee