It hurts my hands to hold a phone for a long time, but apps, games, and the internet in general can be pretty compelling stuff. I tried using the built-in Screen Time features, but they are fairly bare-bones. One of the issues was that I would open an app “for five minutes,” and then get the message out of nowhere that there were only five minutes left on the app for the entire day. It meant I had just lost an hour or two, and maybe wouldn’t be able to use the app later.
(For the sake of argument, assume that I never bypass the limit, knowing it only makes everything worse.)
That’s where ScreenZen came in. I needed a way—ideally, free—to say, “I only want to do these things for so much time, and then I want to be pushed off of them for a while.” When I found ScreenZen, that’s how I configured it. It took me a bit to sort out the options and settings, so I wanted to walk through what has worked for me.
- The basic settings were pretty obvious: “open each app up to [six] times a day, for [twenty] minutes each.” That’s the number of times the app(s) can be unlocked, and how long they are usable for (in real time) once unlocked.
- I set “Strict block – after daily open goal,” so there’s a real consequence to opening things too much.
- I chose some nice offscreen activities, and set that as the intervention screen. (Back when I started using ScreenZen, this transformed it from “tap and then wait” to “wait and then tap,” which was much better for mindfulness.)
- The time between the app being locked and being able to unlock it again is under “Advanced – cooldown time.”
I’ve also set up the schedules so that, in the wind-down before bedtime, more things are locked. ScreenZen has become my “automatic sleep timer” for podcasts. A short cooldown time there also prevents me from hearing it pause, deciding ‘yeah… sure… i feel awake,’ resuming the podcast, and then immediately falling asleep. Sometimes, when only Downtime starting would stop playback, I’d find myself seeking half an hour back in an episode to get something familiar, but now, it’s not usually more than ten minutes.
Overall, this has turned out to be much better than trying to control everything through Apple’s Screen Time. If I’m on the phone for a reason, it generally doesn’t take 20 minutes, but if I get into “rat pulling a lever” mode, ScreenZen will interrupt me much sooner than Apple would. Furthermore, because the stress of holding the phone is nonlinear over time, switching a one-hour daily limit into five half-hour-or-less sessions becomes a reasonable option.
And yes. I would rather get off the phone than put it in a stand, or add a grip to it. When it hurts, it’s mainly because I’m unaware of how much time I’m wasting on it.
The main downside to all this is that, if I need a how-to video on something, I have to plan ahead. I sit down at a non-pocketable computer, watch the video, and take notes if necessary. The videos cut out the boring parts, making it definitely impossible to follow along in real time.
That, and for other people, well… ScreenZen works hard to be “mindful” and not actually that “controlling.” It is willing to offer a bypass in several places. I have managed not to touch it for almost an entire year, but I know it would be rather tempting for someone who doesn’t have physical reasons to avoid it.
So to wrap up… that link again is ScreenZen and it’s available for iOS, Android, and macOS. This is not an ad nor a paid review, that isn’t an affiliate link (unless Blogger has made it one for their benefit), and this post is 100% human-generated.
