Mastery Brief · Episode 2 of The Mastery Project Podcast

Your phone can tell you exactly how many hours you spent looking at a screen. What it cannot tell you is whether that time represented something you deliberately chose, a useful task, intentional entertainment, or a series of automatic behaviors that gradually replaced the reason you picked the device up. In this Mastery Brief, Dr. T-Michael Dougherty argues that the more useful question is not how long, but whether the use was intentional.

What this episode covers

• Why the same three hours of phone use can mean two completely different things
• Why researchers have called the screen-time category a methodological mess
• What a study of app-use sessions found about meaningful versus meaningless use
• Cognitive agency, and how a session’s original purpose can quietly disappear
• A three-question intentionality audit that tells you more than the clock does

Studies referenced in this episode

Kaye, L. K., Orben, A., Ellis, D. A., Hunter, S. C., & Houghton, S. (2020). The conceptual and methodological mayhem of “screen time.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3661. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17103661

Lukoff, K., Yu, C., Kientz, J., & Hiniker, A. (2018). What makes smartphone use meaningful or meaningless? Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2(1), Article 22, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3191754

A note on the Kaye paper. In the audio it is described as a systematic review. It is more accurately a critical analysis — the authors present a critical account of the shortcomings of the screen-time literature and make recommendations, rather than synthesising it systematically. Everything attributed to it in the episode is accurate; the label is not.

Read more on this

The written companion to this Brief is Why Screen Time Metrics Are Not Adequate Measures of Attention. The full-length episode this Brief belongs to is Who Decides Where Your Attention Goes?

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Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Repeated takes have been removed and proper names corrected; the substance is unchanged.

Each week, if we choose to review it, our phones will provide us with a report on the amount of time we spent using our device. And it looks incredibly precise. Four hours and twelve minutes yesterday on TikTok, three hours and forty-eight minutes the day before, two hours on Tuesday on Facebook, and the list just goes on. It might even tell us our average daily screen time is up eleven percent since last week. And because that number looks so precise, it feels informative — like it’s conveying really important information to us.

But here’s a major problem with the data from that weekly usage report. Screen time can only tell us how long we’ve used our phones. It doesn’t tell us what kind of experience we were having while we were actually using them.

Suppose two people each spend three hours on their phones today. The first person uses it to call a family member, navigate across town using the built-in GPS, maybe read a research article, and listen to a podcast they deliberately chose because it held meaning for them personally. The second person opens their phone dozens of times throughout the day without any clear reason. They check one app, they move to another, they scroll for a while, check their email, maybe watch a few short videos, and continually repeat that loop throughout their day. Both of those people use their phones for exactly the same amount of time, but they each use their attention in vastly different ways.

Researchers are starting to point out exactly this flaw in interpreting evidence related to so-called screen time. In a 2020 systematic review of screen-time literature, researchers noted that the category itself is a methodological mess. Many peer-reviewed studies on screen time often collapse activities with very different purposes and contexts into a single generic number, and then attempt to use that to draw conclusions related to attention and focus, among other things.

Because screen time is such an enormous category, attempting to measure it without specificity is a lot like asking whether three hours spent using paper is good for you. I mean, were you reading a textbook? Were you journaling, maybe drawing with your kid, or just staring at a blank sheet? The time could potentially matter, but by itself it doesn’t tell you anywhere near enough to be able to draw conclusions about how you’re actually spending your time.

A 2018 study, though, gets much closer to what I think is a much more useful approach to measuring what’s commonly referred to as cognitive agency — the ability to intentionally direct your attention and actions towards your goals, rather than just passively reacting on autopilot. In this large-scale research study, researchers analyzed over 86,000 app-use sessions to try to figure out what actually made smartphone use feel meaningful versus meaningless.

And not surprisingly, they found that habitual use of an application just to pass the time was strongly associated with a reduced sense of meaning. But the key finding was that participants described a distinct loss of autonomy. They found that even when someone picked up their phone with a specific purpose, that original motivation that led them there often faded and disappeared as their session continued.

The most important distinction here isn’t productive versus unproductive time. It’s intentional versus automatic behavior. Did you pick up your phone because you wanted it to help you accomplish some task, or did you pick it up first and then figure out what you wanted to do with it afterwards?

If I intentionally decide to spend thirty minutes watching something because I enjoy it, that’s one specific kind of experience. But if I open an app to answer a quick message and discover thirty minutes later that I’ve just been scrolling through unrelated content, that’s an entirely different experience and use of my time. The clock records thirty minutes either way, but one use reflects a deliberate choice I made and carried out. The other reflects a series of small choices I barely noticed making — and before I did notice, I was twenty minutes deep into looking at some friend of a friend’s wedding photos.

So I’m not suggesting the weekly screen-time report doesn’t have any value at all and you should just ignore it. It can certainly be useful to know if the number changes dramatically from one week to the next, or to help you spot a trend. I would, however, recommend you stop treating it as a diagnosis of your inability to focus or an inability to exercise discipline.

Instead, I recommend running a quick intentionality audit at least a few times each day. When you notice your phone is in your hand, ask yourself these three questions. One: why did I pick up my phone or open this app? Two: am I doing what I intended to do? And three: what is this activity that I’m engaged in on my phone currently displacing? Or, said a different way, what am I not doing because I’m currently using my phone?

Those questions can give you context about your phone use that a clock by itself can’t. And the answers, when answered honestly, can tell you whether the phone’s functioning as a tool, an intentional break, or just the default destination for every small gap in your day-to-day life.

So the goal here isn’t to get your screen time to zero. In today’s world, that would be an unreasonable ask for most working professionals or students. The goal is to make sure the time you spend on screen — any screen — is time you actually meant to spend there, and in a way that holds meaning for you. Don’t beat yourself up over your screen-time report. Instead, use it to gather more meaningful information about how you spend your time.

I’m Dr. T-Michael Dougherty, and this has been the Mastery Brief. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.