I counted the number of screens in my house the other day – totally normal behaviour, honest – and was pretty shocked at the result. Does a couple with a two year old really need sixteen different displays? Smartphones, TVs, laptops, tablets, smart displays, gaming handhelds… and that’s not even counting the gadgets I have in my home office for testing. Tech really can take over your life if you let it, even if you don’t write about it on the daily. It’s something I’m going to tackle in 2026.
Not wanting my son to grow up glued to screens is a big part of that, but I could also do with clawing back some of my day from a fairly constant cycle of scrolling.
At the moment I’ll admit to reaching for my phone before getting out of bed, bouncing between BBC News, Instagram, Feedly (because there’s still no better substitute for RSS for keeping track of stories from multiple websites) and X. That last one is a puzzler, seeing as my last actual post was over a year ago and the halcyon days of Twitter are now fully behind us. I’m like the smoker who says they’ve quit, but still lights up once per day. And starting your morning by reading about a world that’s perpetually on fire can’t be good for anyone’s mental health, can it?
It only gets worse as the day goes on. I averaged a scary seven hours of screen a day time over the past week. Admittedly YouTube skews that figure a bit – I watch while riding my exercise bike for roughly an hour each evening, and leave a video playing while I go to sleep as white noise. But the number of times I unlock my phone every day routinely hits triple figures, and all the usual suspects appear in my app activity details list.
I already try to keep tech away from the dinner table, avoid TV or games until after my son’s bedtime, and the tablet – which is almost exclusively a Sky Go streamer – has largely returned to hibernation now the Formula One season has wrapped up. So curbing my phone use is the obvious target.
Going cold turkey can’t be the answer, as I’ve got to use a bunch of social media apps for work. Having a second handset doesn’t makes sense either – I’m trying to cut down on screen time, not just split it between even more devices. Unsurprisingly I’m going to give the techy solution a go, and for once it’s one that doesn’t require you to buy yet more tech.
Digital Wellbeing and Screen Time are built into Android and iOS respectively. Each let you put time limits on certain apps, flash up reminders just how long you’re spending doomscrolling, and manage the number of distracting notifications that encourage you to unlock your phone as often as you do.
My main offenders are getting 15 minutes each per day. I’m also removing the shortcuts from my homescreen, so those apps aren’t the first things I see after unlocking. If I’ve managed to avoid certain apps entirely after a month or so, they’re getting deleted. Hopefully that’ll change my habits for the better.
The other side of the coin is also free. Charging my phone in another room, rather than on my bedside table, will mean it isn’t there as soon as I wake up. My smartwatch will buzz with anything urgent. The plan is to have a brief catch-up before work, or at lunch – not the instant my alarm goes off.
Pretty minor changes in the grand scheme of things, sure, but hopefully ones that are easy to stick to, and that’ll have an impact for the year ahead.
- Related: You don’t need a dumb phone – just make your smartphone less distracting
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