Have you checked your screen time lately? The truth can be brutal.
In the UK, the average internet user spends approximately two hours and twenty-four minutes daily on social media. The University of Portsmouth shared that nearly 40 per cent of UK students are now believed to exhibit signs of social media addiction, with young women at particularly high risk. It’s increasingly affecting young people too, with one out of every two teens feeling addicted to their phones. All of this screen time can lead to negative effects on mental health, such as increased anxiety, depression or issues with self-esteem.
So what can we do about it? Last month the government announced plans for a social media ban for under-16s to be introduced in early 2027. In the meantime, a whole world of productivity boosting apps and gadgets are springing up to help users of any age beat the scroll. Downloading yet more apps in order to limit time on your phone may feel counter-intuitive, but these apps are a rarity in that the less time you spend on them, the better. I spent a week testing out different methods to see what can really work.
My biggest vice is Instagram, followed by ASOS – combining unnecessary scrolling with unnecessary spending. Luckily, I’ve so far resisted downloading TikTok and only in the most dire of bored situations will you find me scrolling LinkedIn. I’d like to spend more downtime reading, but all too often my book sits next to me waiting to be opened while I get lost in a screen. I dread to think of the time wasted every day. I was excited to give these productivity apps a go and watch my screen time fall.
First, I just needed to open my phone for long enough to download the apps without getting distracted…
Apple Screen Time
Pros:
- No downloads needed
- Can personalise to different apps
Cons:
- Very easy to bypass
- Doesn’t limit you until you’ve already done the scrolling
On an iPhone, you can set yourself time limits on specific apps. Once this time is up, you get the option to give yourself one more minute, 15 more minutes, or ignore the lock entirely. I set a daily limit on Instagram for an hour and a half – still shamefully long but I wanted to be realistic, with the hope that this could fall.
When you’re deep in a mindless doomscroll, it’s easy to not notice time passing, so I found I was often shocked when the pop up announced I’d used up all my time even before midday, especially during a weekend lie-in. The downside is, it only takes one tap to simply remove the lock and carry on undisturbed.
This method doesn’t limit you opening your apps in the first place, so on days when I greedily used up all my time in the morning, it was unrealistic that I wasn’t going to reopen the app for the rest of the entire day, perhaps at times when it would be more acceptable to scroll, such as during the commute.
Overall, Apple Screen Time is a good gentle reminder (‘What, I’ve been scrolling that long already?!’) but not a strong enough deterrent for the truly addicted. It gave me a good indicator of how regularly I was breaking my ideal time limit, but it wasn’t cutting me off at the source.
Forest
Pros:
- Calming design
- Element of reward for staying off your phone
- Encourages dedicated periods of focus
Cons:
- Need the paid app for some features (such as real trees getting planted in the world)
- Alerts you when your focus session is done – which can encourage you to open up your phone…
- App is not the most intuitive to use
It took less than a minute to download Forest and begin a 10 minute Focus session, growing a virtual tree. Tapping my phone mid-session revealed my gently growing tree and a polite reminder to ‘put down your phone’. It was like being told off by a wholesome grandmother. The second time was more forceful: ‘Get back to work!’. It was surprisingly motivating. I didn’t want my tree to wither! There was a childish appeal to getting a reward for staying off your phone – even if that was just building a digital forest…
One shortcoming I noticed was the ping alerting you to a Focus session being completed. If you’ve just managed to get in the focus zone, this pulls you back out – and ironically encourages you to look at your phone to see your results.
There are additional features too, such as using Forest to lock apps on your phone so you have to be very sure you want to open them. I found this a bit too elaborate (it sends you back and forth between your desired app and Forest, with multiple checks to ensure you want to open the app) and quickly disabled it for being annoying. A slight flaw in my willpower, perhaps.
Overall, Forest stops the mindless picking up of your phone for no reason and is great for when you’ve got to tackle something you’ve been putting off, whether that’s housework or a tricky work email. There are also spin-off versions of the app specifically dedicated to studying, useful for students tackling revision.
Steppin
Pros:
- Motivates you to exercise
- Stops a morning scroll
Cons:
- Won’t limit your screen time if you do lots of exercise
If you want to combine cutting down on screen time with a boost to your health goals, Steppin could be your chosen method. You ‘earn’ minutes on your chosen apps the more steps you do. The scariest aspect was the results from the opening questions about how much time you spend on your phone – at my current levels, I was on track to spend 13 years of my life scrolling…
I like that Steppin limits me from opening my phone as soon as I wake up. No more starting the day with a scroll – you’ll have to get moving before you’ve built up any decent amount of access to use. For days working from home when it’s easy to stay inside, it’s a good motivator to get outside – a double boost giving me more exercise and less phone time.
After commuting to the office and a walk round the shops in my lunch hour, I’d earned 1h 7 minutes. By the time I got home, this would go up again. Given I was trying to get below 1 hr 30, this felt pretty generous and unlikely to gain me much time back. If you’re an active person and your scrolling temptation hits more in the evenings, you’ll have to up the Steppin settings to help shave your screen time down. The default setting is 1 minute for every 100 steps, but you can alter this to make it harder to earn minutes if you want to push yourself to do more. The clever aspect is you can’t bank time – so no storing up minutes to use on days you don’t want to leave the house!
Brick
Pros:
- Requires physical deactivating
Cons:
Brick is the only paid-for option I tested. You’ve got to be serious about wanting to limit the scroll if you’re willing to drop £54 to get there. The founders describe smartphones as both ‘our greatest tools and our most crippling distractions’, which Brick aims to limit.
It’s a small square tile linked to an app, and both parts have to be physically connected in order to unlock your apps. Researching Brick online, the reviews are broadly positive with lots of users saying this was the only tactic that worked for them.
The Brick was easy to set up and the physical barrier is unique. So if you’re on the sofa wanting to scroll and you’ve left your Brick upstairs, you’ll have to go up there and back to unlock the apps. It’s certainly the biggest effort to circumvent the rules of any of the methods I tried and effective at challenging your real reason for wanting your phone. There are also custom modes you can set up such as work, sleep or or family time, to limit different distractions at different times.
I’ve seen suggestions of leaving the Brick in the office for the weekend when you go home, forcing a weekend off your apps. I wasn’t quite brave enough to try this, but can see how it would be effective – whether you’re a workaholic trying to give yourself a weekend break or simply want to embrace more screen-free days. If you want to go properly cold turkey and know you’ll be tempted to break the rules, Brick is the way to go.
StayFocusd
Pros:
- Wide range of features to help limit distraction
- Includes strict methods of blocking content
Cons:
- Tricky to find the extension again to modify features once set up
It’s not just your phone that can suck your productivity. Let’s be honest, who hasn’t had a few non-work tabs open on your computer. See also: the temptation of logging into WhatsApp and Instagram on your work laptop. Are you sending emails, or are you having naturally hilarious banter with your best friend via the medium of WhatsApp stickers?
I can proudly say this isn’t an area I’m too bad in, but I can occasionally get pulled in to scrolling the news. StayFocusd is a Google Chrome extension where you choose websites you want to set time limits on or block entirely. It has quirky stricter features too, such as having to perfectly write out a long paragraph of text before you can unblock sites once your time is up. It even suggests you block the Google Chrome extension site, to prevent you deleting StayFocusd when you want to break the rules. All very meta.
Once your time is up on chosen websites, the locked out notification that takes over your screen is pretty aggressive, with a giant ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ text. It feels effectively shaming that I don’t attempt to circumvent its rules, and it is an in-your-face guilt trip to get back to work. I also think websites are likely to be less mindlessly addictive than scrolling social media, so it feels easier to accept the block. It is a good level of deterrent to have in place to force you back to work if you have got distracted and I didn’t feel the need to advance to stricter features.
Screen Zen
Pros:
- Encourages mindfulness
- Breaks scrolling down into smaller chunks
Cons:
- Breathing exercise didn’t usually dissuade me from using the app
Screen Zen takes an opposite approach to the in-your-face style of StayFocusd. The free app claims that users take back three hours of screen time a day, which is certainly an appealing hook.
There are a few questions to set up the app. This includes setting your own reminder question to pop up each time you open the app you’re trying to restrict, with options such as ‘Wait til Monday?’ (handy if you’re addicted to checking your email at the weekend) or ‘Why am I checking?’ (handy for when boredom calls and social media answers). You also set a timer that encourages you to ‘pause and reflect’ before opening the app, ranging from five seconds to a minute. The aim clearly being that ideally you’ll get bored of waiting or use it as a nudge to do something more useful instead.
You can also set Screen Zen up to show you a breathing exercise every time you open one of your restricted apps. I liked this function – while not necessarily going to stop me scrolling, it’s definitely a calming step to add in to your day. I also thought it was clever that it breaks your chosen scrolling time limit down into chunks you can use throughout the day – recognising that you might still have moments in the day where you can browse, but stopping you entering hours of mindless activity.
My conclusions
While I can’t claim my screen time had fallen off a cliff by the end of the week, I definitely felt more aware each time I picked up my phone. It upped my guilt level and acted as constant reminders of my goals – and even if I broke the rules occasionally, there was always next time…
I found myself reaching to set up Forest the most – the nostalgic gaming aspect of building the garden meant there was something rewarding about resisting my phone. Most of the apps I tried work by setting overall time limits or locks for a day. On Forest, I instead enjoyed entering the dedicated Focus mode and setting shorter timers for when you need to lock in for a set period to get a task done. The irony was that after all these apps and gadgets, my biggest test was simply when I forgot my phone at home one day, and had to spend a day in the office without it.
All these apps and gadgets require some element of self motivation, whether that’s how generously you set your limits or how quickly you break their rules. They work best if you’re genuinely determined to cut the bad habit.
You’ll know in life what methods generally motivate you – if you’re the type who likes to be shouted at in a gym, ScreenFocusd might be for you. If you want more gentle encouragement, Forest or ScreenZen encourage a mindful approach. Brick may give you some separation anxiety at first, but it’s the best way to go full cold turkey. You might even find you’re not that desperate to pick your phone up the next time it unlocks…