I got my latest Screen Time report from Apple halfway through my daughter’s first day at Disney World. Waiting in line for rides, I’d been checking my phone reflexively, tapping app icons. Like many distracted parents, this triggered a pang of guilt that I was looking at a screen instead of being more present for my little one. I do it at home, too, and I’d like to stop.

Ironic that I was distracted once again by a notification telling me to look at my phone in order to learn how to look at my phone less.

Screen time reports — the weekly roundups of time spent on various apps that Apple and Google send its users — are a cornerstone of digital wellness, a concept that’s been around for over a decade. To some, digital wellness might mean simply using their phone less, and to others, it might mean cutting down on distractions, like unwanted notifications.

Following some public backlash about how smartphones were exacerbating mental health issues for young people, Apple and Google gave people additional tools to track and restrict their device usage. In 2018, Apple announced Screen Time, and Google launched its Digital Wellbeing features for Android. These settings were essentially adult versions of existing features that let parents limit their children’s devices, including setting time limits on certain apps. In effect, you could now parent yourself when it comes to digital wellness.

It’s been seven years now, and I’m not sure I feel digitally well.

It’s been seven years now, and I’m not sure I feel digitally well. While I’ve experimented with a combination of hacks in my phone’s accessibility settings and tinkered with third-party apps that nudge my behavior away from bad habits, like many people, I still look at my phone more than I’d like to. And I still ended up being that dad at Disney World checking my notifications.

There is one thing that has helped my phone habits, however. I made my home screen as boring as I could. And when that doesn’t work, I just leave it behind.

Screen time has always been a poor metric

The mission of digital wellness tools from Apple and Google has always seemed confused. After all, it’s counterintuitive that tech companies would release a set of features designed to make you use their products less. Apple and Google don’t actually want you to put your phone down. They just want you to like them.

About a decade ago, a wave of anxiety that smartphones were damaging our brains and, especially, our children’s brains hit the tech industry. In a 2017 Atlantic article, psychologist Jean Twenge asked if smartphones had “

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