My screen time hit 9 hours one Tuesday and that number finally made me put the phone down

Miles Burns · 2026-09-21T10:05:04.907508+00:00

I always rolled my eyes at those screen time posts because I figured mine was normal. Then last Tuesday my phone buzzed with the weekly report and the number was 9 hours and 12 minutes. Not a weekend, a regular work day. I sat there doing the math and realized that was more time than I spent sleeping, eating, and talking to my wife combined. What got me was the breakdown, 3 hours of it was just scrolling through short videos I could not even remember watching five minutes later. I felt sick. I grabbed a notebook and wrote down every time I reached for my phone that evening, and it was 14 times in two hours, mostly for no reason at all. That post about screen time from a guy in Tulsa is what pushed me to actually look at the numbers instead of guessing. So for the people who track this stuff, do you count phone time and TV time together or keep them separate? Because I am not sure I want to know the combined total.

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My screen time hit 9 hours one Tuesday and that number finally made me put the phone down | Blink Before You Scroll - Thought Shares