the question you'll get on Monday

It’s Saturday morning — we finally made it to the weekend… but if I fast forward 2 days, you’ll likely get the question that has Mondays in a chokehold: “How was your weekend?”

For some reason, we’re pretty obsessed about the week ending. On Mondays, we ask about the previous weekend. On Wednesdays, we remind ourselves that we’re halfway through the week. On Fridays, we ask about weekend plans.

And the loop repeats for 52 times each year… as if these 104 weekend days are the most exciting days of our lives.

But I discovered something a bit horrifying about my last 3 weekends: I spent on average 5 hrs 21 min per day on my phone.

And doing some math shocked me even more:

Despite having pretty solid weekend plans, all the times I mindlessly reached for my phone made up over 31% of my weekend — whether it was during my morning “catch up” scroll, waiting in line at the grocery store, or right before stepping into the shower.

And all this made me wonder… do your weekends also look like this? And if they do, should we do anything about it or is it just a moot point?

• Step 1: Figure out if you have a problem. Go to your Settings app > “Screen Time” > “See All App & Website Activity” and scroll through the last 3 weekends. How many daily hours did you spend on your phone last weekend?

• Step 2: Don’t be hard on yourself. If you’re also shocked by your screen time, just remember that there’s nuance in that number — maybe a roadtrip last weekend meant that 2 of those hours came from your Google Maps alone or maybe you spent 1 hour reconnecting with a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. For me, I want to lower the not-so-meaningful time I spend on my phone. So here’s 2 tricks I’m trying out this weekend that might help you too:

  • “Is It enough?” Rule: Have I seen enough of my friends’ stories to realize that they’re good & alive? Have I seen enough news articles to feel informed? Have I seen enough Kate Middleton posts to realize that there’s no new news yet? Similar to the law of diminishing returns, there’s a fine line between being informed versus being consumed. So as you scroll, ask yourself the question “Have I seen enough? Or will the next post/article/story give me net new information?”

  • Gamify the lulls: We reach for our phone during the lulls of the day, like waiting in line at a store or waiting for the subway. Distract yourself by looking at the people around you or make a game out of counting the number of people wearing the same shoe brand as you — anything that helps time pass faster and keeps your phone in your pocket.

In the grand scheme of things, these two tips might not revolutionize our weekends, but (maybe) by cutting down on phone time, we might just carve out enough time for that offline activity we've been putting off. For me, it's reading that $30 book that's been collecting dust on my nightstand.