Recently I started using the app BePresent. The app is designed to help people be more mindful of their screen time. I am not one that is prone to doomscrolling and I’m pretty disenchanted with social media at this point anyway. But I would pick up my phone and play dumb little word games absentmindedly. Or just not pay attention to a full TV show without needing to pick up my phone, even if it was to look up something about the cast of the show I was watching.

But most of all, I wanted to set a better example for my daughter. As a teenager she is using her devices more and more and it bugs me. I don’t think it’s healthy but I can’t expect anything to come from a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.

Granted, her father his hopelessly addicted and can’t get off the devices. He has a habit of turning on the TV the second he enters a room. Then he sits down with his laptop, and pulls his phone out to play games. He needs as many devices going at once as he can.

Anyway, the BePresent app blocks the apps on your phone so you think twice about using them mindlessly. You can allow unlimited use of certain app categories. This comes in handy because I have to use my phone for work tasks, like two-factor authentication and testing my team’s development in various mobile browsers.

However the app tries to organize your apps into categories and sometimes I don’t agree with the classifications. Example: I have 8 web browsers installed on my phone. Most of them get filed under “Utilities” by BePresent but Safari is just a system app. And then I need the “Productivity & Finance” category for authenticator apps. But sometimes I have to test a podcast or video I’ve posted for work, and those are in other categories (“Information & Reading” and “Entertainment”). So while I’m in this focus time, I get blocked from some of the apps I need… and it feels like the camera is never available in any of the app categories I have enabled. Sometimes I want to snap a photo of something and I’m not wasting hours of time in the camera app. Or if I want to quickly scan a QR code and I can’t get to the camera. I have to test those for work too! My work apps run the gamut of their categories.

While it’s good to be held up and second guess if you actually want to open an app, it’s annoying when you’re trying to do something for work.

The other thing I have a love/hate relationship with is the leaderboard and the leagues. If I block all the apps for a set amount of time, then I get extra “points” that help me rank higher on the leaderboard. I realized that if I set my phone to block apps for 2 hours the app tells me I’ll get 25 points. But there were times I left the apps all blocked for 4 hours and it still only gives me 25 points! So now I pay attention to the timer on my lock screen so I can make sure to stop focus time and restart it to get another 25 points.

And why? What do the points get me? There are a few offers for some free audiobooks from audiobooks.com or a free trial period of the Headspace app. But I’m pretty sure that if I took advantage of those, it would just give me a chore to make sure I cancel the trial so I don’t get charged later on. Honestly, if I thought it would give me free Headspace as long as I maintain a certain level in the app… I’d work toward that. But I also don’t know that I would find the time to listen to meditations. I tried the Headspace app about a decade ago and found it difficult to commit. My family constantly interrupts me.

(Of course, my daughter is spending more time in her room away from me and I’d welcome her interrupting me. Not having interruptions gives me more stress than the more frequent interruptions that came from a younger child. Being a parent is hard! Thus why I probably need Headspace.)

Back to the leaderboard… is it good that I’m so worried about getting my points and staying at the top of the top league to the point where I’m paying attention to my phone screen often enough to stop and restart the focus sessions? That seems a little counterintuitive to me.

There is a scheduling component so you can have the app automatically set focus times for you… and once again I realized that setting it to put my phone into focus time over night was only getting me 25 points. But if you set up a schedule that turns your focus time on/off every 2 hours all night long, you can accrue more points. This is ridiculous and part of me fears posting this online is going to expose my secret so people will overtake my spot.

Maybe I should just block the apps with BePresent and ignore the leaderboard. Maybe they should have an option to exclude yourself from the leaderboard to protect your mental health from your hyper-competitive self.

Overall, I do like the app. And I’m averaging less than 90 minutes of screen time on weekdays. Some days I’ve even managed to keep it around 30 minutes. Weekends tend to incur more minutes, as I use my phone for grocery lists and end up with my phone on as I shop. I even paid for an annual subscription, I was liking it enough to pay. I would recommend the app to anyone, because I highly recommend getting off the devices more often. Our society is way too dependent upon these things now.