How many times do you pick your phone up per day?

Another metric to pay attention to when resetting your digital relationship

Hello readers, thanks for your continued interest in this space.

This week I attended the Harvard Kennedy School’s Leadership and Happiness Symposium. It was a meeting set around concepts directly related to what the vision is for Toward Wellth as well as guidance for how to implement positive psychology programs. More to come on that as I digest what I learned and prioritize my own actions for this blog and for the Toward Wellth business plan.

Today we’re going to talk more about the offshoots of screen dependency. In particular we’re going to look at how much the phone gets your attention and then what we can do to build strategies to decrease screen use into our personal toolkits.

First question is - how many times do you pick up your phone each day?

There are built in features in your phone to let you know. On the iPhone, it’s in your Screen Time view (Settings —> Screen Time). Once in Screen Time, click the See All App and Website Activity link and scroll down to where it says “pickups”. My new baseline this week, as I had not used this before is 145 pickups per day (and I’m pretty consistent… 142, 148, 140, 151, 146 over the last 5 days.)

On Android, check your Digital Wellness app and you’ll see the number of unlocks and notifications. You can imagine that most notifications might have gotten your attention and that the unlocks were places where you were ready to either take an action on a notification or you had another use for your phone.

Ok, so now that you know your number of pickups (notifications, unlocks) per day, you can start to architect boundaries with these interruptions / with the ways your phone steals your attention.

Strategies to Decrease your # of pickups (unlocks):

• Decrease or remove all notifications. This may seem simple, but similar to removing all unwanted subscriptions from your mailbox, removing unneeded notifications from your lock screen can prevent pickups.

  • For iPhone, go to Settings → Notifications. In this menu you can set to have a scheduled summary at certain times and set certain app notifications to be dropped into that scheduled summary. I think of this as a type of “digest” that collates all non-essential notifications from a day into one (or two) transmissions, instead of “as it happens”.

    • Go to each App and you’ll see it has “Off”, “Scheduled”, or “Immediate” listed as a category for the app. If Off, no notifications will be sent. If Scheduled, it will show up in the Scheduled Summary (“digest”). If Immediate, it will push to you from the app “as it happens”. You can probably find that many Apps can be turned to notifications off - others to scheduled… you may want to leave immediate notifications for things like “phone”. :)

    • Certain apps, like Facebook, will also have their own set of notification settings. I turned off most of those notifications except to receive friend request notifications, notifications from my groups (I admin a freecycle group), and Comments on posts I’m following.

  • For Android, very similar. There is Settings → Notifications. Difference is most Android phones show you the most recent apps that sent you a notification first… from here, you can tap the app to adjust notifications.

• Use Do Not Disturb mode. When DND mode is enabled, notifications are silenced, making it less likely that you’ll be inclined to pick up your phone. Consider doing this for periods of time or when you sit down to do complicated tasks that require focus.

• Make it invisible. If a phone is in sight, it already has a conscious (or subconscious) effect on your focus. When you go to meet someone to talk, put your phone away. If you work with your phone on the desk, consider putting it in a drawer or in your pocket.

  • The evidence for this has been out since 2018 - which showed that people who had phones visible when engaging in a discussion with a friend or family member felt more distracted and viewed the interaction less favorably … 0.5 points on a 7 point scale. Think about adding up all your interactions and knowing that you’re missing enjoyment by having a phone be present. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226122506.htm

  • Making it invisible is a good tactic to help with habits in general! Taking cookies off the kitchen counter makes it less likely that you’ll eat extra cookies.

• Pay attention to when you pick up your phone. If you find yourself ready to reach for your phone, be present and think of whether you need to pick up the phone.

• Occasionally review your usage statistics. I knew at the beginning of this year that my average daily screen time was 5:45. I set a goal to reduce it by 10% this year. I’m consistently at about 5 hours a day when I review my weekly Screen Time report each Sunday. Now that I also am looking at my pickups (145 per day), I’ll scroll to look at those stats each Sunday as well.

The goal of all of this is being to be aware of what days might trigger more use or more pickups… and then how to adjust for them in the future. If you want to share, put your own screen time averages into the comments and how many daily pickups you have… and if you plan to implement any strategies to decrease your digital dependence.

For other reading please see these prior TW topics on your own digital hygiene: