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Poll: How many hours a day are you looking at a screen?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Poll: How many hours a day are you looking at a screen?

#21
post #4

I highly recommend RescueTime to give you real data on your computer habits, both hours in front of the screen, and a real breakdown of work vs. wasting time vs. entertainment, etc... It has led to a conscious change in how I spend time on the computer.

I think the point of the poll is that the time spent looking at a screen is far more than the time spent on "the computer" for a lot of people. Watching TV, looking at a phone/tablet during commute, reading on an e-reader after lunch, going to a theater after work. All of these cumulate as screen time, and it easily goes up to 10~15h a day in total.

Re: Poll: How many hours a day are you looking at a screen?

#24
I'm at roughly 11 (based on real data) - higher than I'd like it to be.

But this whole question of how many hours we spend doing xyz, is something I've obsessed on since I left my previous job - been very curious about where all my time was going and how that changed. I went all out maintaining a minute by minute lifelog (http://david.achkar.com/life-log/), and one takeaway that's useful to mention here is that intuition about how I spent my time was often way off (vs what my data showed). It makes me doubt the accuracy of self reported numbers vs actuals

Re: Poll: How many hours a day are you looking at a screen?

#28
post #14

Wake up, check email on iPhone in bed. Check Facebook, blogs, etc. while I'm eating breakfast. Start work, staring at a screen all day. Go home, probably work more there. Watch some Netflix. Go to bed, read a book on my Kindle until I fall asleep. Essentially, except for the time when I driving or at the grocery story, if I'm awake, I'm looking at a screen.

Me too and it's sad when we find out in 50 years how bad this is for us. Similar schedule but exercise at lunch in there for me!

Re: Poll: How many hours a day are you looking at a screen?

#29
For those (like me) with 12+ hours: I bet you're not getting enough sleep. Besides f.lux, try melatonin. A tiny dose of 300mcg has helped me a lot to regain the desire to sleep (which was always my problem).

Blue light is indeed the reason why some are still active at 4am. The problem is not that you don't like to sleep; you don't want to sleep, because of your level of melatonin.

Lots of good comments in [1], [2], [3]. Search for f.lux and melatonin on HN and you'll see hundreds of similar discussions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665696

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338601

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