What happens when you track how you use your mobile phone for an entire day?
It was horrible, enlightening and I highly recommend it.
Have you ever been compelled to grip your cell phone and huck that bitch like a vortex football into a brick wall?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with my phone. It’s a relatively new LG G4; it has practically the best camera on the market and a battery life that astonishingly lasts through a commute that involves two trains and a tethered connection to a laptop.
Yet sometimes I want to drop it in the well of one of those military-strength blenders and watch it get shredded into an aluminum cream. If only I could return to a simpler time when I could only be called if I was physically near a landline, and day planner notebooks were the most advanced technology we had to keep a schedule. I hate the demands of this 5.5" pocket-sized noise maker. Not just the anxious feeling I have to check it, the FOMO and phantom rings, etc. — yes, of course I have that. But it’s the alerts that I can’t keep up with. I’d be willing to bet you (savvy internet person who stumbled upon this Medium article, and probably owns a smartphone) feel that way sometimes too.
So I was curious about how I behaved with the phone on a normal day an decided to track it, in part using the free app QualityTime.
A few ground rules before we get into the data:
- I can’t downplay the role that my job has in how I interact with my phone. I’m sure to a certain degree this is universal, but I am a communications director with my phone directly linked to a half dozen social media channels. You combine those alerts with calendar, emails, and texts from work colleagues and it certainly adds up.
- For whatever dumb reason, because let’s face it, technology hates all of us (it’s not just you or me), every appointment I have on my work calendar prompts 4 separate alerts. Two alerts because Google’s sync with my office’s calendar system will put two separate events on my calendar, and each of those events has a default 5 minute warning alarm.
- This isn’t totally comprehensive. I didn’t track the number of times that I responded to a Google Hangout conversation on my phone versus the ones that occur in a chat-box on my desktop. In other words, the data on here represents even less use on my phone than I’m reporting.
The Data
First notification from phone: Daily 5:15 am alarm. Yeah, that shit is rough.
Total combined number of email alerts (work and Gmail): 51, most of which are just automated alerts, such as the “ yo, our bad but your train is running late” email from the Metra and random nonsense like Chase sending a note to tell me to login to their website to read an additional email about a quickpay transaction being accepted.
Total number of scheduled calendar events: 4 — relatively quiet day. 16 individual alerts, though.
Combined social media alerts: 39 on Facebook (because I posted a joke that was fire) and just two alerts on Twitter (my joke on Twitter was comparatively, not fire)
Total actual phone calls: 1. To my girlfriend, which lasted less than 30 seconds as we tried to coordinate where to meet before seeing a play.
Total number of text messages: 12.
Total number of Google voice texts: 11 — all with random internet strangers because when you sell an old TV on Craigslist, you don’t give out your real phone number like a noob.
Grand total time spent on phone: 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Grand total number of alerts: 131.
Average rate of alerts per minute while awake, 5:15–10:52 pm or 1,057 minutes):
One alert every 8 minutes.
Analysis
I was shocked. Checking my phone once every 8 minutes on average is a lot of screen time. I would guess that of average smartphone users in a similar position as me (with a healthy social life and normal demands from work), one alert every 8 minutes may actually be on the lower end of the spectrum. I just don’t think about the effect an interruption every 8 minutes has on me. How can I focus on anything? I mean, really focus? It is truly miraculous that I get any work done at all. The frustration builds throughout the day— my caveman brain gets stressed trying to balance all the inputs I get at once. Humans just weren’t built to do that. Also, of the 131 alerts that I had on my phone, none really excited me or made me happy. It’s always just another alert to dismiss — and there were always a handful more coming.
What I found interesting was how little proactive use I did with the phone. I initiated one phone call, and then I spent a few minutes scrolling through my Twitter feed while I waited for my train.
After one alert every 8 minutes I’m tired. Just tired. At the end of the day I want to turn the phone to silent, put it in a dresser drawer and then throw my dresser into the mouth of a volcano.
I am most likely feeling the effects of alarm fatigue.
Alarm fatigue is a very real and potentially dangerous problem in hospitals. It’s a problem everywhere really, but not necessarily dangerous. Alarm fatigue is the result of a well-intentioned system of alerts to aid nurses and doctors with getting vital updates on patients and reminders to do routine tasks. The problem is that there are so many (sometimes thousands per day) that often, instead of a doctor proactively treating a patient, they end up just responding to whatever alert happens to be going off at the moment. Which at best, means that patients aren’t getting as much focused-care as they could, and at worst means that eventually the human brain just tunes out the constant chatter and buzz of alarms and beeps while grandpa lies there in pain waiting for someone to reset his pacemaker.
It’s an important philosophical question with the adaptation of any new technology that we never ask ourselves. Does this new thing make your life easier? Or does it create more more work, more stress for you? The answer is never clear until it’s too late to go back.
Can we ever go back?
Unless mankind faces the robot uprising, zombie apocalypse, or climate change makes it impossible for us to grow food in the future and we begin to fight each other to death over basic resources in the thunderdome, I just can’t realistically envision going back to the pre-smartphone era. And I’m old enough to remember a time when we didn’t have mobile devices and constant 4G connections — where email occurred 14 kbps at a time and if I wasn’t physically at my desk, you simply couldn’t call me.
And yet, we still had a society back then.
But I can’t break away from my phone. Not from a practical perspective and I fear, not from a biological perspective either. Am I physically addicted? Maybe — but it’s more to it than a compulsion to check and see if a Facebook joke is well received. I’m constantly offloading cognitive energy onto the phone without realizing it. Last week while editing a press release, I found myself looking up the spelling of some words that frankly a professional communicator shouldn’t be looking up. I don’t trust myself anymore. I’m not alone — our consciousness, our idea of memory and knowledge and how we apply it to conversation and communication is completely augmented by the freely available infinite source of information in the cloud.
Our brains are being rewired
A recent article in Scientific American describes a study in which subjects were asked to type a number of facts into a computer and were separated into two groups. The first group was told their work on the computer would be saved, and the second was told that their work would not be saved. Predictably, the group who knew they could offload their cognitive energy onto a computer were not able to recall as many facts as the the other group, when quizzed later.
Almost all information today is readily available through a quick Internet search. It may be that the Internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory but also of our own cognitive faculties. The Internet may not only eliminate the need for a partner with whom to share information — it may also undermine the impulse to ensure that some important, just learned facts get inscribed into our biological memory banks. We call this the Google effect. (Scientific American)
I had drinks with some friends recently. The scene was what you would expect in 2016 — all of our phones out and in hand or on the table, each of us trying not to break conversation yet feeling the urge to take a peak at our device every few minutes. I mentioned a funny SNL skit I had just seen. Within seconds, it was already on a mobile phone screen. I guess there’s no point for me to describe anything really, if that “thing” is always available. After all, language is really just the best tool we have to put an idea in another person’s head — I fear that technology may eventually eliminate the middleman.
Before we knew it had happened, our relationship with technology drastically and permanently changed. The way we interact with others, the expectations you face at work, and how we use our own memory will never be the same again. This stresses me out and terrifies me and I don’t know what to do about it.
So if I eventually I crack and throw my phone into the mouth of a volcano, at least you’ll know why.
P.S. Before you throw your phone into a volcano, follow me on Twitter at @JonesTheNinja. Please recommend this to your friends if you liked it.
Thanks for reading!
