How do you manage screen time for yourself?
I know a blogger who is going to have something to say about this prompt! Her post yesterday focused a lot on screen time. Talking about you Squiggle Line Cafe!
With yesterday’s question being about time, I didn’t really include screen time. To answer about it today though, I can honestly say I don’t manage it. “Manage” implies that I monitor and control how much time I spend in front of a screen. And I just don’t do that. I think I need to though. But only when it comes to social media. It’s true that I am trying to build my platform so that writing agents and publishers will be more likely to take me seriously as a writer and publish my book. I enjoy engaging on social media. I’m very active on Threads (I’m orangeturtle22 on there). I need to get more active on Instagram and am toying with the idea of making videos again. They just take a lot of time to make and edit.
And that’s the other thing…social media can be a time suck. Threads has a little timer that you can set to remind you to take a break for whatever time interval you set. However, when it asks if I want to take a break, I always say “not now”. It’s not like it logs you out when you reach that interval. But screens aren’t all bad. I can’t write a book without using a screen to type it. I mean, I could. I could use my fancy teacher handwriting that I still have and write it out. I think that would decrease my chances of it getting published even more than having a small follower count on social media.
Screens aren’t bad. But I think I would like to, at the very least, stop scrolling sooner before I get in bed than I have been. Sometimes I lay in bed and scroll which keeps me up longer than I would like.
Here’s the great thing though, I’m an adult and at the very least, I don’t have to worry about my parents limiting my screen time. Come to think of it, if I was a teenager now and my parents were the same as they are, I probably still wouldn’t have to worry about them exercising any parental controls on my devices. They were never that involved in my life and what I did. I do remember that when we got a family AOL account, they didn’t tell me the password so they had to be the one to log me on. So maybe they were a little more involved than I thought. (P.S. That AOL family account is how I found out they were swingers. True story).
So, having said all of that, I don’t manage my screen time, I think I should sometimes, but in all likelihood, I won’t be changing my screen habits anytime soon.
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