Some of us jokingly say that we’re addicted to our iPhones. A newly released app calledMoment will show us just how true that statement may be. Designed to promote a healthier balance between our real lives and those lived through the small screens of our digital devices, Moment tracks how much you use your phone each day, helps you create daily limits on that usage, and offers “occasional nudges” when you’re approaching those limits.
The app’s creator, Kevin Holesh, says he built Moment for himself after realizing how much his digital addictions were affecting his real-world relationships.
After moving in with his fiancée and settling into their new lives together, they both started whipping out their iPhones at the end of the day to unwind, Holesh explains via a blog post. And while that’s okay to a point, for him, it was becoming a serious problem.
“We stopped doing fun and productive things and chose the path of least resistance,” he writes.
Sometimes, too much of a good thing is just too much, it seems.
As an iOS developer himself, Holesh decided to build a solution – yes, in the form of an iPhone app. But this app isn’t meant to be actively used. Instead, it’s “designed to be invisible,” says Holesh. That is, after you set up Moment the first time, you never need to open it up again. The app will just run in the background, alerting you as to when you’re going over your daily limits.
Holesh tells us that most people don’t realize how much they’re on their phone.
“As a tiny experiment, I asked people to guess what their daily usage was and they were almost always 50% too low,” he says. “The daily limits have helped people set a goal for how much they’re on their phone. My main goal with Moment was make me aware of how many minutes I’m burning on my phone each day, and it’s helped my testers do that, too.”
The overall goal with Moment is not about getting you to “put down your phone forever and go live in the woods,” Holesh notes on the app’s website. It’s about creating a balance in our lives.
There’s also a bonus function in the app related to whether or not we’re putting our phone down in favor of going out on the town, so to speak – Moment can also optionally track where you’ve been throughout the day.
Source: TechCrunch