CALCULATOR
Screen Time Calculator
See how much of your life disappears to screens.
3 h
0h8h
1.5 h
0h6h
1 h
0h4h
25 years
Continue exploring
bloc
bloc users save an average of 1.5 hours every day.
A small device that breaks the loop.
CALCULATOR
See how much of your life disappears to screens.
Continue exploring
bloc
bloc users save an average of 1.5 hours every day.
A small device that breaks the loop.
Enter roughly how many hours a day you spend on social media, on video streaming and on other apps, plus your age. The calculator adds them up and turns your daily total into a yearly figure, the share of your waking day it takes, and how many years of waking life it adds up to between now and age 75, assuming 16 waking hours a day.
It then translates the yearly hours into things you could have done instead: books read (at about 6 hours a book), kilometres walked (at 5 km an hour), short online courses finished (at about 15 hours each), and what the time would be worth at ₹500 an hour. The numbers are estimates meant to make an abstract habit concrete, not a precise accounting.
Most people guess low, so check before you start. On iPhone, open Settings, then Screen Time, then See All App & Website Activity for your daily average and your top apps. On Android, open Settings, then Digital Wellbeing & parental controls. Use your weekly average rather than a single day, and split it into social, video and everything else to match the sliders above.
For adults there is no single safe number. Work on a screen is not the same as an evening of scrolling. A more useful question is what your recreational screen time is replacing: sleep, exercise, time with people, or focused work. If the answer is any of those, the number is too high for you.
For young children the guidance is clearer. The World Health Organization advises no sedentary screen time for children under 2, and no more than an hour a day for children aged 2 to 4.
On iPhone, go to Settings > Screen Time to see your daily and weekly averages. On Android, go to Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls. Enter those hours into this calculator to see them as hours per year and years of waking life.
There is no single official limit for adults. A practical test is whether your recreational screen time is replacing sleep, exercise, time with people or focused work. For children, the World Health Organization advises no sedentary screen time under age 2 and no more than one hour a day for ages 2 to 4.
Studies link heavy recreational screen use with poorer sleep, shorter attention for focused work and lower mood, although cause and effect is hard to separate. Late night use is the clearest problem, because it pushes bedtime later and makes it harder to fall asleep.
Combine awareness with friction. Know your real numbers, cut the one app that takes the most time, turn off social notifications and keep your phone out of the bedroom. App timers can be dismissed in one tap, so a physical blocker like bloc, which locks chosen apps until you tap your phone on an NFC device on your fridge, holds up better.