Phones are a girls best friend?

Tuesday 10 April 2018


In 1949 Carol Channing sung the song Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, during the hit Broadway show, Gentleman Prefer Blondes; and it was made famous in the 50’s by It girl Marilyn Monroe performing it the film remake. Over the years many many many people have sung or quoted the words from this famous song! But in modern day society it kinda feels like this may have changed a bit.
Rather than diamonds being a girl’s best friend, it’s iPhones!

Over the last few months I’ve become more and more aware of just how much time I spend on my phone each day. But didn’t have a way of accurately figuring out, how much time it actually was rather than what I assumed or wanted it to be. However after seeing a conversation on Twitter, I found out about an app called Moment.

Moment is an app that does one job, it monitors your phone usage. It runs in the background whilst you’re doing your stuff on your phone, and times how long each day you’re on it. For over a month now, since March 8th, I have been tracking my phone usage and it really does seem like my iPhone is my best friend.  I also tracked the amount of time I spent on my phone whilst on holiday, but I haven’t included those in my lil’ analysis as it didn’t seem very representative of my normal life. Over the 22 days from March 8th to March 30th I have cumulatively spent 100hrs and 74 minutes on my phone, out of the 528 hours that those 22 days hold. That is an average of 4hrs, 57 minutes a day.

Looking at those statistics I’m not quite sure how to feel really, I guess without having someone else’s statistics to compare them to it’s a little tricky. But in reality 100hrs over 22 days seems and feels like a lot to me, but then an average of 5 hours a day out of 24, doesn’t necessarily seem that much. Yet going on to the app and actually seeing how many hours a day I’ve spent scrolling and tapping and typing, it does feel like a lot of my day.

The question of do we spend too much time on our phones and social media is one that has raged over the last few years, with many, many, many people saying that the answer is yes. That we need to put our phones down, go outside and actually talk to people. But thanks to phones maybe we actually spend more time talking and connecting with people than previously. We no longer only know the people who live on our street, or in our village or that we go to school with. But can connect with, share and speak to people not only in our own country but those in countries across the globe. We can easily stay in constant touch with friends who we don’t live near anymore, rather than only being able to send them letters and hoping they don’t get lost in the post.

I guess like most things, phones have both their positives and negatives, and monitoring my phone usage these past weeks has really made me think about and consider how much time I spend using it and how I spend my time in general. Being given the time and reason to consider what it is I spend my time doing on my phone and why I do it, has been both really interesting and helpful. I don’t think I can promise that I’m going to drop my average phone usage to an hour next month. That feels very drastic and very unrealistic, but constantly monitoring how much time I spend on my phone versus doing other things. Or keeping an eye on what it is I’m doing on my phone, so playing games compared to keeping in touch with people, is something that I definitely want to do.    

I would highly recommend downloading Moment and monitoring your phone usage. It’s a very, very interesting experiment, and really does make you think about things and consider how you spend your time and what it is you’re really using your lil’ phone friend for.