One of the frequent questions that David Broncano often throws at his guests on La Revuelta is about how they use their phone. Specifically, daily Screen Time, a metric on iPhone that can be checked very easily to know, on average, how many hours we are glued to the phone; you can even see which app you use most and the hours of use each day throughout the week.
It also includes tools to limit the use of each app to help avoid spending more time than necessary in front of your device.
View the Screen Time on your iPhone or iPad
To view Screen Time on your iPhone or iPad, you can follow these steps:
- Open the Settings on your iPhone.
- From all the sections, find Screen Time.
- You will see the average daily use relative to the week.
Next to the daily average you’ll also see a percentage showing the difference in use compared to last week. That way you’ll know if this week you’re using your phone more (or less) than usual.
But that’s not all: if you tap on a day’s bar, you’ll see the total hours you used the phone during that day.
And if you tap «See All Activity», a new screen opens full of interesting data, where you can check which apps you’ve used most so far today and whether overall usage has been more for entertainment, social, productivity or creativity; this will depend on which apps you’ve used most.
If you keep scrolling down you’ll continue to see a very detailed breakdown of other relevant details related to your device usage, such as the searches you’ve made on your device and what time the first one occurred that day, and even the number of notifications you’ve received (and from which apps). All this information can also be viewed for previous days of the week.
How to limit phone use
If seeing all this information has alarmed you because you realize you spend too much time glued to the screen, in the same Screen Time section you have features like Downtime to set a schedule during which only the apps you choose will be available.
Similarly, you can restrict app usage by time, that is, set a daily timer that will run internally whenever you are using the apps you specify. If you exceed the set time, it will be blocked until the next day.
Keep in mind that the Screen Time feature is shared across other devices where you’ve signed in with iCloud. If you prefer to have your activity separated by each Apple device, you can disable the option in the Screen Time section in your device’s settings.
