I am slowly closing the topic, because the issue has been solved, solutions proven to work, there’s like 2-3 concrete options in the thread of how to track phone time with beeminder with physical device, without it etc. I recommend to copy and paste everything into GPT to outline you the methods, all the mistakes I made, some missing assumptions.
The mistake
I think there core mistake made here was treating the symptoms rather than the underlying problem. This is not a bad thing - it also works, gives a sense of achievement. Nonetheless, there are also good things related to phone use. Operating AI agents, reading, speaking with friends, repeating language material.
The underlying problem I identified was a loop:
- a lot of things on my plate
- failure to make significant progress in any of them
- promise yourself to compensate the time in the evening
- avoid commitment and escape to phone abuse
and go back to point 1 next morning.
I think this pattern, abstracting the “material” part from it, is very common. Simply swap the stressor, the reward and you’ve got your own loop with overeating, with binge drinking and so on. Change the point of view and then comes the narrative that the "willpower is a muscle”.
Global solutions
The core solution was to give up some projects or move their priority and focus on one at a time to get it done. This way, I manage to have them all:
- Much calmer life - hard to put a number on it, but I feel subjectively calmer
- Back to phone usage with relevant applications and use cases
- Change in the time quality, more books read and so on
I think I can also boil down the learning the fact that you have to have a clear goal in your life. In my opinion some boundaries might help, but clarity on the goal is the key. Then boundaries will emerge naturally to protect the goal.
General tips
Behavioural patterns aside, I think there are two concrete things you can always do, that will have positive effect on your life:
- Putting phone in the box; during some specific time it can help you with just being more present or achieve more. For me, that would be during the evenings with my family, for you it might be your learning time, work time, before sleep. Choose a trigger that should put the phone away and reconnect later.
- Having hard time limits on the dopamine apps (X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok). They can be generous, like 1h a day, but still have them in place. You can use Jomo on iOS to achieve that.
New screen time campaign
I’ll run a new goal for the next month, very simple, that checks if I put phone away between 17 and 22 for at least 1h. This goal has many design advantages over my previous stack. Requires minimal setup, is easy to track - datapoint insertion happens right after the pick up as a first thing.
Given the time slot, I should be able to see the result in screen time report from Apple. I will log hours spent, so the total time reclaimed will be visible as my beeminder goal’s cumulative total. During past 3 weeks I spent about ~22h in front of the phone, but it’s structurally different time - working, learning, connecting with people.
In my previous poat:
Out of ~26h each week, 15h is dedicated to Chrome and an hour or two to YouTube. Another 2h is focused tasks (Anki, Duolingo, Beeminder) and another 2h is chores or work (text messages, maps, spotify). Then add another 5 on random noise (banking app, more YouTube or checking emails).
in the past weeks, leisure time hardly crossed 8h a week (that would be ~1h a day). This is acceptable.
My forecasted screen time is this:
| Week |
Forecast |
| 12.04 |
20h |
| 19.04 |
18h |
| 26.04 |
16h |
| 3.05 |
14h |
Relevant commitments:
I think it’s likely to anchor and stabilise around 18h - this was a big threshold last time, then positive and neutral use cases come into my way. Remember that these 18h will include Car Play, switching between the apps, notifications popping up in the middle of the night. It means 2h or less a day, including call to grandma and Anki.