Paid a guy $50 to show me what my phone was actually doing at night

So I dropped 50 bucks on one of those screen time coaching calls after seeing a headline that said the average person checks their phone 96 times a day. The story everyone shared was about how apps are built to hook you, but the call went a totally different way. The guy had me pull up my own data and it turned out 80 percent of my pickups were me checking for one specific work email that almost never came. He called it a slot machine I built for myself. The headline stuff about evil apps was half true, the other half was me. What really got me was when he asked how many times I opened the app in the 10 minutes before bed, and it was 14. I told a friend about this and he said his was the same but with a group chat. Curious what tip or trick actually cut your pickups down, because mine only dropped from 96 to 74.

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colethomas2h ago

Wonder what the coach said when you told him the number only went from 96 to 74, because that sounds like a big drop being treated as a fail when it really isn't. Did he dig into which pickups were left, like was the work email app still the main one or did a new habit sneak in to replace it? Also curious if the 14 opens before bed was the thing you actually tried to fix first, since that seems like the easiest one to kill with just leaving the phone in another room. That friend with the group chat thing is interesting too, because a chat is way harder to quit than a work email that never comes. So my real question is this: did anyone ever tell you to just delete the email app off your phone completely and check it once on your laptop, or is that too obvious for a 50 dollar call?

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