Weekly Screen Time Tracker
A one-page log for seven days. Tracking alone shifts behaviour before you change anything, which is why week one is observation only.
Weekly Screen Time Tracker
Fill this in each evening for a week. Don't change anything yet, the point of week one is an honest baseline. Your phone reports the daily total; the pickup count and the two questions are what actually reveal the pattern.
| Day | Total | Pickups | Worst app | When did it get away from you? | What were you avoiding? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | |||||
| Tue | |||||
| Wed | |||||
| Thu | |||||
| Fri | |||||
| Sat | |||||
| Sun |
At the end of the week, look for the two or three time windows that repeat. Almost everyone loses the same stretches: the first minutes after waking, the gap before sleep, and one dead period in the afternoon.
Change one window next week. Not all three.
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Why these are paper
Because a tracking app that lives on the phone is asking the device causing the problem to also be the place you reflect on it, and because opening an app to log something is one more reason to unlock a screen. A sheet on a kitchen counter or a fridge door is visible to everyone it concerns without anyone having to go looking, which matters most for the household ones: an agreement nobody can find is an agreement nobody follows.
Every printable here is free, sits behind no email address or account, and is yours to edit. Print it, or save it as a PDF from your browser’s print dialog.
How to actually use one
- Fill it in at a fixed time. A log completed from memory at the end of the week is a different measurement from one completed each evening, and the difference is larger than most people expect.
- Do not change anything in the first week. Measuring a habit tends to shift it before you have deliberately changed anything, so a baseline collected while you are already trying to improve is not a baseline. Watch first, act second.
- Write the reason, not just the number. A total tells you how much. The column that changes behaviour is the one recording what you opened the phone for, because the useful finding is usually how many pickups had no purpose you could name afterwards.
- Fill in the household ones together. A rule written by one person and handed to another is a rule that gets tested. The clause most templates leave out is what happens when it gets broken, and agreeing that in advance, while nobody is defending anything, is the whole reason to write it down.
What a sheet cannot do
It cannot tell you whether your number is bad, because there is no threshold to compare it against: four hours in two deliberate sittings is a different situation from four hours in ninety scattered pickups, and no printable can distinguish them for you. It also cannot make a change stick on its own. The tracking is what tells you which change is worth making, and the change is a separate piece of work.