Phone Screen Time & Laptop Usage
Phone Screen Time & Laptop Usage is an ongoing research project exploring how our everyday devices shape focus, productivity, and well‑being. By tracking real habits across phones and laptops, I look at when technology supports deep work—and when it quietly gets in the way.
Analyzing the intersection of productivity and digital wellness. Our research provides deep insights into the behavioral shifts caused by ubiquitous screen exposure across mobile and desktop platforms, examining how dual-device interaction shapes our daily routines and cognitive health.
Methodology
After 4 days of monitoring and logging data, including my screen time and search history, I compiled a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet showing the kinds of online engagement I was most likely to have and what my phone usage looked like. The data I gathered is sectioned off into two groups: laptop browsing history and iPhone screen time. While the laptop's Google Chrome history does not track the time spent on individual websites, it does track the number of visits. The 100-row history section on the spreadsheet is condensed from an original 700-row selection, spanning from February 24th to the 27th. The iPhone screen time section was measured from February 26th to 28th. Google Chrome history was recorded using the Chrome History browser extension, and iPhone screen time was recorded through the phone settings. With the information collected, I hope to discover what kind of engagement I have when I'm on these two devices. I also hope to uncover common format types and purposes for the time I spend daily online.
Key Findings and Insights
Laptop History (Google Chrome Extension)
The Google Chrome history extension pulls all recent searches and places them in the spreadsheet by time and date. The spreadsheet for this includes website URLs, visitation times, purposes, formats, and types of engagement. The most visited website in my history was my personal email account. It was visited/interacted with a total of 123 times in 4 days. To me, this seemed like a lot. However, I believe the history counted each email I clicked on as a search. The second most-visited page was the Google Drive used for schoolwork. This page and ones like it were visited 102 times. The third most visited page was Kennesaw State's D2L, with 90 visits. Overall, the two most common purposes of my online interactions were for communication and education. This was not surprising to me, but I did not expect email to be such a large part of my online time.
iPhone Screen Time
The second part of my spreadsheet shows my iPhone screen time over a period of three days. The data collected showed that I use my phone for an average of 139 minutes or 2.31 hours a day. On average, the most used apps were X, TikTok, and Spotify. The least used apps were Messages and Gmail ( I guess since I use my laptop for email). The most common type of engagement I had from my phone was passive, compared to being very active on my computer. The most used format was also different from my phone to laptop. My screen time is mostly video and audio, compared to text in my history. Education was the least used category when entering the data from my phone. Overall, these results did not surprise me.
Conclusions
After viewing all the data, creating graphs and charts, I was able to visualize and categorize my online presence. Search history from Google surprised me by how many times I visit/revisit certain websites. The fact that the same type of URL appeared over a hundred times in 4 days was a shock to me. However, the content and purpose of my visits were expected. I believe that most people use laptops primarily for work and school purposes. My hypothesis is that most people's entertainment comes from cell phones, tablets, and TVs. For phone screen time, I was surprised by the total amount of time I spend on my phone on average. Initially, I believed it would have been significantly less than two hours, when in reality the average was slightly higher.
Download the full Group Media & Content Analysis project as a PDF