Live in the Moment (app review)

Do you ever think about how much time you spend on your phone? I get a hard time from my coworkers about being a millennial who is always on my phone. Personally, I don’t think I’m on my phone very often. However, this is a highly subjective view of myself. As a scientist, I always let the data speak for itself so I decided to download Moment. The results were surprising and a bit depressing.

What is Moment?

Moment is an iOS app that tracks how much screen time you use on your iPhone and iPad each day. Smartphones are incredible devices that connect us to the entire world, but it is easy to ignore the life around you when you’re staring at a screen. Everywhere I go, I see a group of friends sitting together in silence, immersed in social media. Moment works to give you feedback about how much time you are spending on your phone and let you set daily limits on yourself and notify you when you go over.

Moment is free to download, but you can download the premium version that unlocks all the features for $3.99. Moment premium features include screen-free time, daily limit, and tiny reminders.

Moment runs in the background at all times. It will stop keeping track of your screen time if you quit an app by double tapping the home screen and swiping up on Moment. Remember apps still run in the background until they are force quit. Moment does not take up a ton of battery even though it is running in the background constantly. I found Moment to only take up 1% of my battery in the past seven days.

Moment is broken down into four main sections seen at the bottom when you open up the app. The four sections are screen time, insights, coach, and settings. Opening up Moment will default the screen time section. This will show you a summary of your daily phone usage. The days will be highlighted green, yellow, or red. The green color means you aren’t using your phone too much, the yellow indicates that you are using your phone a moderate amount, and the red color means you are using your phone too much. Tapping on each day will give a detailed summary of your daily usage including screen time, how many times you picked up your phone and app usage. Scrolling down will show you a timeline of every time you picked up your phone and the duration you used the phone for.

The insights tab will show you statistics on your daily, weekly, and quarterly phone usage. The quarterly phone usage is a premium feature. The insights statistics will show information such as how much time your phone usage increased from the previous day, waking life of your phone, pickups, and most used app.

The most used app feature isn’t automatically tracked. You’ll have to go to your the Settings on your iPhone and go to the battery options. From there, you have to tap the clock icon and take a screenshot of all the apps on your list. This is the only way that Moment can pull most used app data from your iPhone.

 

The bored and brilliant option is a free seven day virtual course to stop distracting yourself with your phone and let your brain idle. Each day, you’ll get an exercise to do sometime to help make changes to your habits around where you focus your attention. This course is based on Manoush Zomorodi’s book Bored and Brilliant.

Impressions

I really loved the simplicity of this app. You don’t really have to do anything to make Moment useful for you. Most of the features are done automatically behind the scenes for you. The only thing that takes work on your end is to take screenshots of your battery usage if you want to track your most used apps. I thought this option was too much work and I can just go to the battery settings on my iPhone to see, which apps use the most battery power.

It was very surprising and a little bit depressing how much I use my phone. Moment told me I was using a whopping average of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day. Although I use my phone a ton for work, I can definitely tell I waste time when I’m home, mindlessly scrolling through social media. I really like how the data is laid out and how useful it is to see a visual representation of your phone usage. This reinforces the idea that I need to spend more time not looking at my phone and interacting with the world around me.

Overall

Moment is a fantastic app to track how much time you are spending on your iPhone screen. If you’re like me, you probably have a gross underestimation of how much you actually use your phone. If you find yourself in a circle full of friends staring at a phone screen, it might be time to limit your phone usage. Go live in the Moment and experience what life has to offer.