What app eats up most of your screen time —
and do you even feel bad about it?
I recently checked the Digital Wellbeing section in my phone settings. AntennaPod consistently comes out on top, anywhere up to an hour per day. I do not feel bad about it at all.
AntennaPod is the app I use to listen to my favourite podcasts, usually while walking the dog. So the time is doing several things at once. I am listening to stimulating ideas. I am exercising. And I am enjoying time with the dog. Everyone wins and is better for it.
This is why screen-time statistics can be misleading. They measure duration, but not quality or context. Twenty-five minutes of distracted scrolling is not the same as twenty-five minutes of listening while walking through the neighbourhood. In my case, the phone is usually in my pocket. The screen itself is barely involved.
More importantly, the benefits do not always end when the walk does. Sometimes the combination of movement, fresh air, companionship and stimulating input leaves me so energised that I come home and write for an hour. Ideas begin connecting. A thought from the podcast meets something I have noticed on the walk, and something new begins to form. Last year, after one of those walks, I came home and wrote a short story. It later came second in a competition.
Digital Wellbeing could record the time I spent using AntennaPod, but it could not record the walk, the exercise, the pleasure, the ideas, the hour of writing or the story that followed.
Perhaps the better question is not how much time an app consumes, but what kind of life it helps us live. The app that uses most of my time does not steal me away from the world. Sometimes it sends me back into it more alert, more energised and ready to create.
The Afterword 
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