My Full-Time Job Is Reading Hacker News

Apple tells me I average 2.5 hours per day on my phone. If a full time job is 40 hours per week, I'll spend the equivalent of over 4 years per decade in the full-time job of pissing time away on my phone. Ah, the good life!

2.5 hours per day amounts to:

• 17 hours per week
• 38 days per year
• 22 work-weeks (of 40 hours) per year
• 9125 hours per decade.
• 380 days per decade
• 228 work-weeks per decade
• 4.3 work-years per decade

The little things add up, don't they?

National average

These stats are encouraging, putting my measly 2.5 hours to shame.

Among users aged 8-12 in the US, average entertainment screen time amounted to 5 hours 33 minutes [per day] in 2021.

That's 50 work weeks per year-- a full time job. Everything is fine, here. I'm sure this won't deepen the mental health crisis.

What worked

This got me thinking. Why do I reach for my phone? Maybe 25% of the time, it's for reasonable things-- reading a recipe, talking to a hooman, etc. 75% of the time, it's to escape the mundane. It's that 75% figure that I want to reduce.

Leaving my phone

By far the best thing I did was to leave my phone behind. When it's not in the same room with me, I become acutely aware of my impulses. I find myself reaching for the phantom phone. This produces a jarring "Oh yeah." moment which I use as a trigger to do something better:

• Deep breathing
• Jotting down thoughts on a notepad
• Picking up a book

Books, pen, and paper

I found a few books that I've been meaning to read through, and put them in strategic locations: my nightstand where it replaces my nighttime news reading habit, the bathroom, ya know, and my office. For the same reason, I also added a pen and nice notepad to a few rooms (office, kitchen, nightstand). This has been marginally helpful in reducing screen-time, but has been quite nice in increasing my reading and writing throughput.

Detox weeks

My wife and I did a digital detox week. For that week, our phones become old-school house-phones. They are relegated to a specific spot, and we only check them the way we would have checked an old recording machine back in prehistoric times. This week was excellent. We've decided to do one a month.

Time-boxing Hacker News

Most of my idle phone time is spent reading Hacker News or the rabbit trails I find there. I love Hacker News. The conversations are high quality. The articles are interesting. It's the best place on the web, and that makes it dangerous if you want to reduce your screen time.

I gave myself a Hacker News time budget. One hour per week, on Saturday. I go to Algolia and scan the top stories for the week, build up a reading list of anything that seems worth deeper time, and quit.

On weeks where I do this, my screen-time goes down significantly.

What didn't work

I tried a few things that didn't work, either.

Grayscale

I converted my phone to grayscale. There's some evidence that it curbs phone addiction. It backfired for me. The web is a garish place, and grayscale gives it a minimal, pleasant uniformity.

Do not disturb

I keep my phone in do-not-disturb mode, with emergency pass through for work and other important contacts. Life is much more pleasant in do-not-disturb mode. But, it turns out, communication isn't the thing that draws me to my phone, so this had no impact on my numbers.

Results and takeaways

Writing this article triggered the frequency illusion. I've become much more conscious of flipping my phone out to escape the present moment. As a result, I've gotten a heck of a lot more done since my first draft.

My personal reform is too nascent for me dispense sage, condescending advice, but I can say that you should run the math on your own phone usage. The results may surprise you and just might be the kick in the pants you needed to get off your ass.