Reclaim your time

The Problem — One tenth of my life?

I stumbled across an app: “TimeWise: Year Wrapped”.

As the name suggest, you get a wrap-up of the completed year—just like the Spotify year wrapped—but for your screen time.

According to the app, I spent 1.917 hours on my phone in 2024. I don’t know if that can be true. This would make around 37 hours a week, almost a full-time job.

But this still got me wondering how much time I do spent on my phone.

The only other source to review my screen time I found was google’s digital well-being app. Here I can only overlook my daily usage for the last 4 weeks. Adding up the days allows me to calculate a weekly average.

In calendar week 32 to 34 I spent:

• 20 hours and 42 minutes (2:57 h/day)
• 16 hours and 27 minutes (2:21 h/day)
• 13 hours and 50 minutes (1:59 h/day)

That leaves me with an average of 17 hours per week, or 2:26 hours a day. Thankfully, a lot better than what the app suggested.

But still excessively much.

If we take this 17-hour average for a full year, that’s 886.4 hours, or 10.12% of all your time that year. And I do think those weeks are fairly representative of my phone use. Maybe even a bit lower than usual because I worked a lot.

According to the Digital 2025: Global Overview Report people on average spend 3 hours and 46 minutes a day looking at their phone.

The Solution — Minimalist Phone

For the last week, I started using Minimalist Phone. An app, that changes the launcher of your phone to look… well, minimal.

You got two pages.

A home page featuring the time, your battery life and a list of selected apps:

And the only other page showing a list of all your apps installed:

It’s wonderfully unflashy and impractical. Using minimalist phone, my screen time this week went down to 7 hours and 36 minutes. A 55.29% reduction.

So what?

It’s not about saving time.

This project is about using that time in ways I can look back on and feel were well spent. For me, that’s not time spent watching YouTube—apparently my most-used app.

So here’s what’s next:

• I’ll keep using minimalist phone.
• I’ll share an update on its effects in a month—and maybe again after a year.
• I’ll introduce a new project that makes good use of the time freed up.

The latter will probably happen next week, or the week after.

Therefore, stay tuned.

Until next Sunday!