#2 The Screentime Experiment
Background
So, in a "new year, new me" type of endeavor, I have decided to reduce the time spent glued to my phone. To get a baseline, I first checked the Digital Wellbeing menu on my Android smartphone and reviewed my stats for the first full week of 2026. In disbelief, I saw a total of 25 hours and 20 minutes of screen time for that week. Slightly over 13 hours of that were spent on TikTok, while another 2.5 hours were spent on YouTube.
The Mathematics of Free Time
In my humble opinion, those stats are unacceptable for the way I would like to live my life, considering the week only has 168 hours to work with. Assuming 7 hours of sleep per day (which totals 49 hours a week), that leaves 119 hours a week during which I am actually conscious. Assuming an average of 9 hours of work a day, an additional 63 hours are spent working. This means that after the two necessities to actually stay alive—sleep and work—I am left with about 56 hours of free time to spend doing whatever I like. Seeing that I have spent just shy of half of that glued to my phone for multiple weeks consecutively left me a little devastated.
How Do I Fix That?
Let's not kid ourselves. New Year's resolutions are usually doomed to fail because they typically follow the "I want to stop X or start Y immediately 100%" template. That is not the way I—and arguably most people—build habits. Additionally, I still love technology and refuse to ditch all forms of social media entirely to revert to a caveman-style of communication via SMS and phone calls exclusively.
The Doomscrolling Hell
Looking at my screen time stats, it becomes painfully obvious that what keeps me on my phone for the longest time is short-form content like TikTok or YouTube Shorts. It has been known for years that this specific type of content has an enormous addictiveness for our brains, with studies suggesting that it has very real effects on health parameters like sleep quality. However, until I actually checked the amount of time those apps drain from my life, I was under the somewhat ignorant impression that it did not affect me that much and that I did not doomscroll as often.
Small but Decisive Steps
To make a long-term change to my behavior, I have decided to take the CGP Grey approach and implement small but meaningful steps towards the broader goal of freeing up time in my day-to-day life. TikTok, however, being by far the worst offender, just had to go. So, to the settings I went, and I pressed uninstall.
As for YouTube, I don't think getting rid of it entirely would do any good for me. After all, there is good long-form content on there that I enjoy, but to avoid getting sucked into an endless loop of scrolling through YouTube Shorts, I have decided to limit my use of the YouTube app to one hour per day. I did the same for Instagram. I rarely scroll through Reels, but I do like to exchange funny memes with friends through IG DMs, so removing that entirely would likely set me up for failure.
Reddit and Twitter (or X, I guess), due to the nature of their content, have never been a huge time sink for me, so for now, I have left them unrestricted. Apps that are used exclusively for social exchanges with friends (like WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, etc.) will also remain unlimited, as will apps like Spotify or Audible that I do not actively use but usually run in the background.
I believe leaving some forms of social media open, which are typically less addictive, is crucial for success since going full "no social media" overnight would probably do nothing but make me feel awful and lead to quitting.
We will see how it goes... Expect an update in a week. Until then :)