How much do I use my phone?

You have seen the reports – Americans check their cell phones on average 110 times per day. Assuming eight hours of sleep that is once every 10 minutes.

Aside from teenagers, it is a tough number to accept. So, just before Halloween last year I installed Moment on my phone and have been tracking my usage for the past six months. In reality, I forgot it was there after the first few weeks, so re-discovering it last week was a bit of a ‘found data’ surprise.

The results are (Nov 29 2015 – April 28, 2016):
Total phone usage: 511.2 hours
Unlocked the phone: 4,195 times

That translates to about 2.8 hours a day of use across 23 separate daily sessions.

I am a fairly active phone user – the tracking map in Moment carefully details my 30 second sessions at each traffic light on my daily work commute.  But 23 sessions is not exactly ‘110.’

My most active day was Jan 21 of this year – 590 minutes or 9.8 hours. No idea why – it was a normal work day, so perhaps I was streaming music or podcasts. On the other hand, I did have eight days where I did not use the phone at all – mostly weekends.

Moment has a decent export feature that provide geodata, battery level and so on. But – a basic chart will have to do for now. My phone use for the past six months -the blue line is sessions on the left axis, the green is minutes used on the right axis: