I monitored my friends' phones. What I saw horrified me.
That's how I ended up trying out Clearspace, one of several apps designed to help people take control of their screen time, and perhaps the most brazen of them. Clearspace, backed by Y Combinator, not only lets you restrict how many times you open an app each day but is testing a new feature that lets you see how much time your friends are spending on their phones. Screen-time creeping has entered the chat.
When you sign up, you can opt to give yourself a set number of times you're allowed to open certain apps in a day. For example, I let myself open TikTok six times (probably a generously low guess on the number of times I was clicking the app daily) and gave myself three times to open Facebook, home of my favorite serotonin-boosting activity: mindlessly scrolling Facebook Marketplace for cheap home goods. While I'd prefer to open Slack and Gmail less often than I do, I'd also prefer to keep my job. Each time I wanted to browse secondhand shoe racks, before I could open Facebook, Clearspace prompted me to take a deep breath and read an inspirational-poster quote — like "However little television you watch, watch less," credited to the historian David McCullough, and "Wonder is the very engine of life," from the explorer Erling Kagge. Then I could select how long I'd like to stay in the app (10 minutes at most) before I'd be kicked out. For TikTok, that was a helpful nudge back into the real world. For The New York Times' games app, it filled me with ire; I can't do a Sunday crossword in 10-minute increments. Off the restricted list it went.
My friends weren't exactly thrilled to join my experiment. One downloaded it, restricted TikTok, and then texted me: "I'm currently scrolling on TikTok and plan to all day. It better not stop me." When the app ultimately did, I could see that she deleted TikTok from her restricted apps, added Duolingo, and clocked nine hours of screen time that day and 10 the next, an amount that both stunned and impressed me, given she has a full-time office job. (When confronted, she blamed the high screen time on her Kindle app and podcasts.) It doesn't appear she ever opened Duolingo, so I won't expect to see any sudden improvements in her Spanish anytime soon.
Royce Branning, a cofounder of Clearspace, says the company started testing the friends feature after hearing that users were taking screenshots of their Clearspace screen tracking and sharing it with one another. That can open up conversation, as it did when I asked my friend how she spent 10 hours on her phone in day. Branning says that building the feature into the app is a way to "arm people's little community with the ability to encourage each other," or compete. Branning says he and his cofounder use it to keep each other accountable, but there's a sense of friendly competition. Still, they don't think the goal is to get screen time down to the lowest possible levels. "We don't think screen time is inherently bad," Branning says. "We want to reduce regrettable usage."
I'm not sure where my friends spent all their screen time, but being on a phone doesn't inherently ruin your life. Sharing memes is how I bond with my friends. Procuring the perfect used plant stand from Facebook Marketplace requires constant vigilance, and when I finally see that trendy item I've been looking for marked down to $20, it's a cosmic thrill. And I'm sure that breaking news about the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric "Trash Revolution" Adams led my screen time and X usage to skyrocket.
Dr. Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, says one of the big problems with staying surgically attached to your phone is that the screen is often replacing something else in your life. If you're scrolling Instagram and TikTok for hours instead of exercising or meeting up with friends, you may be swapping healthy activities with sedentary and anxiety-inducing ones.
Most research about the negative effects of screen time focuses on children rather than adults. While kids are using screens increasingly often to learn, excessively staring at them has been linked to anxiety, depression, and lower cognitive abilities. For adolescents, social-media use can contribute to insecurities, body-image issues, and eating disorders.
Still, the amount of screen time even children should be allotted has gotten murkier. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended limiting screen time to two hours a day, but in 2016 it did away with the hard line, instead guiding caregivers to focus on "mindful use" of screens. Experts don't really know how much screen time is too much — and that makes the minutes and hours ticking up on screen-time apps harder to decipher.
Screen-time apps like Clearspace, OffScreen, AppBlock, and slew of others designed for parents to set limits for their children might be useful, but they can't on their own be a fix for excessive scrolling. Nagata says there has to be "some sort of buy-in" and desire to reduce screen time. "This is just a tool to limit your use," he added. My friends lacked the willpower, and the openness, to fully buy in. One immediately refused to download it, saying that the results would make her feel too guilty and that she doesn't look at her screen time. Another said she planned to delete it as soon as the trial for new features expired (after which Clearspace charges $50 a year for its premium version) and found the app-opening limits annoying. And I don't think my first friend paid much attention to my screen time — she was clearly busy doing other things with her phone for nine hours.
Branning tells me he imagined people would share their screen-time totals with very close friends — the same people they share their location with. His hunch was right: I already share my location with the friends I had try the app, and I find myself checking to see where they are from time to time, even though we live in different cities. Watching their screen time tick up gives me another glimpse into what they're doing when we're apart, and it's a further breakdown of their private actions that I really don't need. Maybe my friend who didn't want to join us was onto something about keeping her scrolling a secret.
It was less the peer pressure and the more the irritation of waiting for the app to open (and being reminded that there are other things I could do with my time) that got me to spend less time scrolling. The icons of the apps I chose to limit were shaded on my screen, deterring me from clicking and undergoing another breathing exercise before opening them. I stuck to my limits every day — even clocking in below them. And after the first day, I did find myself less inclined to spend time on TikTok than before, but I watched more Instagram reels, which are just less-funny TikToks or videos I already saw on TikTok last month.
Maybe logging in to an app like Clearspace with friends, family, and romantic partners could help people police each other. Perhaps you'd think twice before opening TikTok for the 18th time on a Wednesday knowing that judgmental eyes could be lurking. As for me, I'm not going to pay too much attention to the number of times I pick up my phone or how long I'm on TikTok. And I'll definitely be going back to doomscrolling in private. Ultimately, we may want to prioritize limiting how much we know about each other than limiting our screen time. Knowing less about everyone's business leaves more room to wonder, which is, after all, the very engine of life.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.