If we are going to consider our digital wellbeing, a useful first step is to reflect on your own interactions with technology, media, and digital communications. We need to gain a better understanding of our own habits if we're to assess the extent to which those habits are having a positive or negative impact on our emotions, health and relationships.

Recent surveys both in America and Britain have indicated that the average adult spends just over 22 hours online per week (; ; ). At a first glance this seems like a lot of time, but when you put this in the context of a 168 hour week it seems perhaps a little low. The question asked in both instances was "How many hours in a typical week would you say you spend online at home / at your workplace or place of education / anywhere else?". It would seem that the respondents took this to mean active online engagement, but subsequent questions in the surveys highlight other aspects of online engagement which may not have been considered in the first instance: media, gaming, streaming, multimedia content, etc. If we take these things into account then the time spent online significantly increases. Perhaps we need to rephrase the question as:

How much time do you spend interacting with digital technologies and online content at home / at you workplace or place of education / anywhere else?

Following the coronavirus, the majority of us have had a significant increase in screen time: working or studying remotely has increased our work screen time; unable to visit friends and family we rely more on social media and video calls to stay connected and living under lockdown; nights out have been replaced with online alternatives such as streamed television or gaming. How has this impacted your habits? Has it helped you draw a line between different digital activities or has it blurred the boundaries more? Has the additional screen time prompted you to purposefully take time out offline?

So let's reflect over the next week to better understand our habits and the impact current circumstances have had on our 'screen time'.