![]() ![]() Most of the time there, I am writing blogs, answering emails, and reading articles and research materials that are relevant to my work. Of course, I am on a screen for much more than half an hour a day, but that is because I am on my computer screen. So, a Screen Time notification that places my screen time at 30 minutes or less is what I wanted. The impact is even more negative for children. That’s not to mention being able to withstand boredom, a lack of stimulation, and living without immediate gratification, for extended periods of time.Īs it turns out, there is evidence that indeed supports these intuitions. I think I share an intuition that many people hold, which is that screen time really does have a negative and measurable impact on one’s ability to focus, reason, and creativity. Luckily, I had/have enough self-control to not be jumping onto YouTube or those information rabbit holes while working-this was mostly threatening my free time, which I do not like to waste.īut still, an hour on YouTube or Wikipedia after work, spending a chunk of time just “unwinding” before getting around to reading, or exercising, or whatever I should have been doing, was not as relaxing as I wished.Īfter enough of these troubling notifications, I decided to take a stand: I would do whatever it takes to spend less time on my phone, and more time doing things that I actually wanted to get done. The main culprits were YouTube, which always has a just-short-enough video ready to recommend a user, and Google in general-being able to look up anything at any time, find any factoid or go down an information rabbit hole at any whim. (I never downloaded TikTok, but I still do have a LinkedIn). And that was even after I deleted the “big three” social media platforms: Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Įven if you do not set limits and restrictions for yourself using Screen Time, which you can find in the settings, you have probably seen the weekly notification pop up that shows you the hard data about your phone usage.įor the writer of this article, that weekly notification would often be over an hour long, sometimes several hours. There is no real-time syncing between iOS app and macOS app except sharing file information.I f you own an iPhone, then you are doubtlessly familiar with the feature called Screen Time. The issues I see with Vitmain-R is that you have to re-enter a lot of data to define the time slices. Vitamin-R seems to be best in class but I hope they add some additional features for ease of use. There seems to droves of Pomodoro apps but most of them do not have a good feature set and seem to get rotten quickly and get discontinued. There was a previous app that I cannot recall the name of and it clicked all my boxes but was discontinued. Now testing another app named Focus Booster. Although I liked this app it has been very buggy and the developer’s engagement seems low with their last tweet on Twitter happening in 2019 so I have yanked it and went back to Vitamin-R. I was using Vitamin-R previously then switched to Tomatoes also sold as All Things Done. I still use a Pomodoro Timer as suggests and love the technique but the available software leaves a lot to be desired. The reporting features are amazing and it even can be set up to create invoices. I use Harvest as it is also multiplatform and if you forget that it is running it will track you down with notices say “Hey you have not done anything for a while” and give you a set of options. I’d probably trust Due to get my attention more than I’d trust a notification. The final actions of that shortcut could set up the next 30 minute reminder (or not, if you’ve finished tracking for the day).Īgain, as an alternative, you could use Due for the recurring reminder part, with similar thinking for logging notes/actions and setting the next timer. ![]() ![]() “continued”) to indicate that you’re continuing the same task/action from the previous 30 minute block. For ease/speed, you could set this up with some default text (e.g. The notification itself could be set to run a shortcut that prompts you to note current task/item and append that text to a file. You could schedule notifications from within Shortcuts using Toolbox Pro. I’m fond of logging time direct to my calendar, but if you’re not using a specific time logging app to capture the data, you might append entries to a text file in iCloud or Drafts or some other Shortcuts enabled app that can accept text input that’s already in your toolkit. Question is how/where you want to log what you’re doing. ![]() The recurring reminder part isn’t too much of a problem (I might use Due for that part). I do this, which might be a starting point for you. Someone else might have a better recommendation for a single time-tracking app with the kind of built-in recurring reminders you’re looking for, but Shortcuts could probably still work… ![]()
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