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What counts as screentime?

I’ve been talking to some friends and to my surprise a few of them said that reading comics or books on the tablet doesn’t count as screentime! And maybe they’re right, I dunno.

The Answer

I turned on the “app limits” setting under “screentime” on iPad a few days ago. So far I’ve put a 25 minute on Fediverse and a 4 hour limit on Safari as a whole. My goal is to gradually cut down that Safari time to 2h25m. I don’t have any current plans to cut down on the Wikipedia app or the RSS reader or interacting with Fediverse via toot over SSH.

To my annoyance, there’s no way, as far as I know, to have app limits without getting bugged by notifications with “screentime reports”. But this first week has been pretty horrifying. I average over 16 hours with this tablet. Talk about terminally online. 😰

That’s just the tablet, that’s not counting paper books or e-ink.

But it does include writing and programming and reading comics and making synth patches. This past week hasn’t been a lot of TV but I read through Bakuman, Platinum End, a bunch of old Knights of the Dinner Table collections and half of Crazy for You. And hanging out on a video chat playing D&D.

Talking to another friend, we came up with a bunch of cockamamie exceptions. We both said reading e-books on e-ink could be OK. If I wget a bunch of web pages and read them on e-ink, is that OK? He came up with a fun one, looking at old Viewmaster discs, is that more OK than TV? Etc.

In the end, I wanna slice it up four ways:

1. Mindlessly surfing on the mindless part of the internet

2. All other uses of color LCD/CRT screens. Reading RSS, writing, reading comics, watching TV shows etc

3. All other forms of sitting and crying at home, including e-ink, paper books, paper photo albums, jigsaw puzzles etc

4. Actually doing IRL things

I wanna cut down on 1, and I’ve tried doing that with the “app limits”.

And I do think 3 is a lot less bad than 2. There is something hypnotic and unhealthy and magnetic about this color screen that feels worse than drugs. Spending sixteen-and-a-half hours per day looking at it for [the past four years] is not good.

But it’s 4 I wanna increase.

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