The secret to scrolling less

I got my latest Screen Time report from Apple halfway through my daughter’s first day at Disney World. Waiting in line for rides, I’d been checking my phone reflexively, tapping app icons. Like many distracted parents, this triggered a pang of guilt that I was looking at a screen instead of being more present for my little one. I do it at home, too, and I’d like to stop. 

Ironic that I was distracted once again by a notification telling me to look at my phone in order to learn how to look at my phone less.

Screen time reports — the weekly roundups of time spent on various apps that Apple and Google send its users — are a cornerstone of digital wellness, a concept that’s been around for over a decade. To some, digital wellness might mean simply using their phone less, and to others, it might mean cutting down on distractions, like unwanted notifications. 

Following some public backlash about how smartphones were exacerbating mental health issues for young people, Apple and Google gave people additional tools to track and restrict their device usage. In 2018, Apple announced Screen Time, and Google launched its Digital Wellbeing features for Android. These settings were essentially adult versions of existing features that let parents limit their children’s devices, including setting time limits on certain apps. In effect, you could now parent yourself when it comes to digital wellness.

It’s been seven years now, and I’m not sure I feel digitally well. While I’ve experimented with a combination of hacks in my phone’s accessibility settings and tinkered with third-party apps that nudge my behavior away from bad habits, like many people, I still look at my phone more than I’d like to. And I still ended up being that dad at Disney World checking my notifications.

There is one thing that has helped my phone habits, however. I made my home screen as boring as I could. And when that doesn’t work, I just leave it behind.

Screen time has always been a poor metric

The mission of digital wellness tools from Apple and Google has always seemed confused. After all, it’s counterintuitive that tech companies would release a set of features designed to make you use their products less. Apple and Google don’t actually want you to put your phone down. They just want you to like them.

About a decade ago, a wave of anxiety that smartphones were damaging our brains and, especially, our children’s brains hit the tech industry. In a 2017 Atlantic article, psychologist Jean Twenge asked if smartphones had “destroyed a generation.” The following year, two prominent Wall Street investors asked Apple to study how its products were affecting our health. Screen Time was the company’s answer. Google launched its Digital Wellbeing tools around the same time. Many social media apps, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, now offer features like these, too, usually in the form of parental controls.

Apple’s Screen Time reports show you some basic stats: total screen time, time spent on individual apps, the number of times you picked up your phone, and total notifications. You can also set time limits for apps as well as downtime, so that only certain apps are available for a period of time. Google’s Digital Wellbeing reports are virtually identical. This is all buried in your device’s settings, and on Apple devices, the data gets deleted after seven days.

This information is kind of interesting if you’re someone who likes looking at stats to spot patterns. It’s almost like fitness tracking for your attention. But unlike Apple’s Health and Fitness apps which, if you have an Apple Watch, will proactively prompt you to stand up or alert you to loud noises, Screen Time just passively collects this information and delivers it to you once a week through a push alert. 

Although there’s been a lot of focus on screen time for the past decade, knowing the amount of time you’ve spent staring at a screen isn’t all that helpful. And when it comes to social media apps, it’s a really poor metric, according to Amira Skeggs, a researcher at Cambridge.

“When you say screen time, that could be someone calling their mom on WhatsApp and having a beautiful conversation, really fulfilling, or it could be a 14-year-old looking at self-harm content on TikTok,” Skeggs explained. “And those two things are equated as screen time, and obviously those relationships to well-being are going to be vastly different.”

The fact that these reports give you numbers and little actionable information is a well-covered topic. The New York Times reported as early as 2019 that “‘Screen time’ is over.” The Atlantic called Screen Time reports “The Worst Feature Apple Ever Made” last year, and Wired said “Tracking Screen Time Is Ruining Your Life” in 2023. These are melodramatic takes, in my opinion, but I do wonder if there’s more that Apple and Google could be doing. 

You need a nudge

Together, the software made by Apple and Google are running on over 98 percent of mobile devices worldwide. If Apple and Google really wanted to, they could be doing a lot more to integrate digital wellness features into their operating systems. A nudge here or there — something as simple as prompting people to take a break — could help billions of people stop doomscrolling. 

“If it was a priority for them, you would be seeing better integration,” Andrew Przybylski, a professor of technology and human behavior at the Oxford Internet Institute, told me. He went on to explain that you can’t easily export Screen Time data and you can’t enroll in clinical trials about your device usage like you can with Apple Health data. Apple does make certain device usage data available to researchers through its SensorKit framework. Researchers also have very little insight into how Apple and Google develop Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing features. 

“There are just things in the last seven years that are missing that you would expect,” Przybylski added. “You would expect that there actually would be some independent testing to show that they work.”

I asked Apple and Google about integrating digital wellness tools into their operating systems. Apple declined to comment. Google did not reply.

To be clear, Apple and Google have updated these suites of features, but those updates have largely focused on parental controls. After cracking down on third-party parental control apps, Apple introduced a Screen Time API in 2021 that enabled developers to build apps using certain Screen Time data without compromising user privacy. Google, meantime, released an alert called Heads Up that tells you when you’re walking and using your phone. And last year, Google quietly rolled out a feature called Screen Time Reminders that nudges you occasionally if you’ve been in a single app for too long. 

When you compare these incremental improvements to third-party digital wellness apps, you can start to get a handle on just how much more Apple and Google could be doing. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks testing out three popular ones — Forest, One Sec, Freedom — and although my reflexive phone-checking isn’t cured, I’m a lot more mindful about how I spend my attention looking at screens.

• Forest is my favorite app so far. Borrowing from the Pomodoro time management technique, it lets you “plant” a digital tree, and for a set amount of time, you can’t leave the app or the tree will die. Forest rewards you with tokens for focus sessions that you can use to unlock new kinds of trees to plant. It’s $4 to download and own, and it’s oddly compelling to use.

• One Sec, which has a more complicated setup process, essentially adds a time delay when you try to open certain apps. It lets you create custom interventions for each app, including simple tasks to complete before an app will open and activating your front-facing camera to look yourself in the eye before proceeding to doomscroll. The free version lets you do this with one app, and for $20 a year, the Pro version gives you unlimited apps as well as a few other features.

• Freedom is even more comprehensive and gives you granular control over which apps and websites to block during certain situations. Because it taps into Apple’s Screen Time API, which lets it communicate with your phone’s operating system, Freedom can completely change the way your phone works when it’s on, dimming blocked app icons and preventing websites from loading in Safari. It costs $40 a year.

What’s really worked in terms of helping me be on my phone less is just making it less interesting. Making your phone grayscale is the easiest way to do this. It’s boring to scroll through Instagram when everything is black and white. You can also try Apple’s Focus Modes, which let you create presets to minimize distractions for different scenarios — Google’s Digital Wellbeing has similar features — or just turn off notifications altogether.

The secret to scrolling less is simple: Make your home screen boring. Use the grayscale trick or use the “Tinted” option in your iPhone settings or use your Android settings to make the app icons monochrome. While you’re at it, delete as many app icons as you can. You can keep the ones you really use on your phone and use the search feature to find the rest. You can also use widgets for basic info like your calendar and the weather so you don’t have to open the app. 

Most of us don’t even notice how much we’re staring at screens without purpose. In a sense, I had to break my phone to get it to work right. My home screen is now monochrome and sparse. I only get notifications when a human is trying to contact me, and when I really want to pay attention to my family, I just leave my phone in the other room. It’s impossible to scroll when you can’t touch it.

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