I know as a child, and sometimes even as an adult that I have had the feeling that I was killing time watching TV. Of course, it helped for most of my childhood that there were only three channels (somehow, I managed to survive), so I needed to find ways to entertain myself instead of falling into the TV trap.
Unfortunately, today, I can’t count the number of times that I have absentmindedly turned the TV on to kill some time, only to be sucked into a string of shows.
We all would benefit from realizing how much time we dedicate to the screens in our lives, be they phones, computers, tablets, or televisions. Depending on the study, the average American spends between 7 to 11 hours a day looking at screens. This screen use might be okay if it all occurred during our eight-hour workday. However, I suspect that if we closely examine our own screen time, we will find it is not all related to work. For example, here is a breakdown from one recent study.
- Watching TV/Videos 3 hours 16 mins
- Gaming 1 hour 46 mins
- Social Media 1 hour 27 mins
- Browsing the Web 51 mins
- Other 1 hour 13 mins
We can all quickly check our screen time usage on our phones. The iPhone has Screen time located under settings. Here is a look at just my phone screen time last week. I was on my phone for a total of 22 hours and 10 minutes last week for a daily average of 3 hours and 10 minutes a day. I picked up my phone a total of 463 times last week (an average of 66 times a day). Why? I spent 7 hours and 32 minutes surfing Safari the previous week. Again, why? I am not advocating that we all get rid of our screens but to become more conscious of what we are doing with the screens and the opportunity cost. As I mentioned in a previous post, we all have roughly 3,832 hours of discretionary time a year. Are we using them to our best advantage?
Let’s return to one of my big vices – television screen time.
Today the average American household has 189 cable channels, which only includes some of the available pay-to-view channels. A New York Times article reported that the average American adult watches 5.07 hours of television daily. The bulk of that time – about 4.5 hours – is live television. Live TV watching means that despite most of us having a DVR, we watch TV on the network’s schedule and delay our activities. I hate to admit it, but I tend to watch mostly live TV and more than I really want – of course, I am in good company since about 49% of Americans say we watch too much TV. I am pretty sure I don’t average 5 hours of TV a day, but I do have the TV on more than I should, and most of the time, it is on something I only have a passing interest in watching.
In terms of the effort to find the time to do all the Nothing you want, the average adult spends about 1,850 hours a year, or about 48% of their 3,832 yearly discretionary hours watching TV. I am not advocating giving up TV altogether, but my focus this year will be on controlling what I watch and when I watch it.
So I will lay some ground rules for my TV time this year to reduce my screen time …
No live TV, only DVR – this way, I can control when and what I watch and skip the commercials saving time.
TV with a purpose, no shows to kill time (which is what it does) – Angie has commented that there isn’t a cooking competition show that I wouldn’t watch (even if it is a re-run). Of course, these cooking shows include shows like BBQ Pitmasters, and I don’t even eat meat – so go figure.
The objective, this year, will be to limit live TV, so I will track the number of days of Non-live TV and the total number of TV hours to get a feel for how things are going this year.