
“Are you on your iPhone again!?”
Enter the clever little app called Moment.
Moment comes from developer Kevin Holesh, who actually wrote the app for himself, who suffers from the same problem we all do…spending too much time on our phones.
The app is quite clever in how it tracks your usage.
It only tracks usage when you are “on” your phone.
This means that while your screen is unlocked, and busy in an app, it counts the usage.
But when you are say, listening to iTunes through your EarPods, or getting turn-by-turn directions from Siri, it doesn’t count. Very clever!
When you set the app up for the 1st time, you have a handful of simple settings to set and forget.
Firstly, choose to auto-track your phone usage. (Why wouldn’t you right?)
From my experience, this does not eat away at the battery, and if you get down to around 15% battery or so, the app switches off auto tracking until you charge again. Very nice of you Moment 🙂
Then choose if you want to track the places you go.
I didn’t think too much about this, but looking back now, you can actually see the exact routes you have taken or moved through as your phone was on and tracking. Might be a great addition to the over-protetctive dads out there 😉
Choose when to actually track your phone usage, between the morning and evening hours of the day. Make it 24 hours if you want, but that might be a bit over the tip right?
Set yourself a daily limit.
I hd no idea what I would/should need to set here, so I kept the default of 60 minutes. Clearly, this is not enough for me…yet.
The interesting thing about this setting, is that when you reach the limit, every couple of minutes you go over it, it gives off a little annoying alert (you can choose your annoying alert of course), reminding you that you are into overtime with your allowed usage.
Makes you think about what you actually did in the day to get to your limit. (Dungeon Keeper for iOS is not helping my 60 min limit)
Set yourself a little “mini reminder” every X minutes. This keeps you aware of your usage all day long. Thank goodness, these are subtle alerts, and won’t scare the meeting members out the room.
And that’s it!
Keep on using your phone, and learn to curb the usage very quickly, and creatively.
The app is available on the App store for a reasonable $4.99, and is most definitely worth every single cent.
Also check out Kevin’s app website here for more info about the app specifically.
This app has definitely made very aware of how much time I am spending on the phone, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
But it is definitely the start of something interesting…