About the screen you're reading this on

How many years of your life will your phone take?

Enter your age and daily hours on your phone. This page turns your number into days, books and miles — what it costs in a year and by age 80.

Your age age 32

Hours a day on your phone 4.5 hours

Move the numbers and the whole page recalculates.

Your real number is in your phone: Screen Time on iPhone, Digital Wellbeing on Android.

Example: age 32, four and a half hours a day.

9 years

on the phone, by age 80

At 4.5 hours a day, from age 32, that is 28% of the hours you're awake.

Each square is one year of 80. The years on the phone are lit.

past
left
on the phone

For comparison: a British adult who uses the internet spends on average 4 hours 30 minutes a day online on a phone, tablet or computer (Ofcom, Communications Market Report 2026, Ipsos iris measurement, May 2025, among users aged 18+).

One day

How much of a day goes to the phone?

A day has 24 hours and doesn't negotiate. Here is yours, split between sleep, phone and everything else.

4.5 hours on the phone out of 24 — 28% of the 16 hours you're awake. Sleep: 8 hours. The rest: 11.5 hours.

One year

How many days a year do you lose to the phone?

Multiply one day by 365 and you get a year. Each dot is a day; the lit ones go to the phone.

68 whole days a year — days of 24 hours, nights included, about two months and a week.

One life

How many years does the phone add up to in a lifetime?

The same hours, told differently. Three translations of your number — what the hours could be, if they weren't on the phone.

205 books a year
This year's phone hours would buy 205 books of 300 pages, counting about 8 hours of reading per book.
245,000 miles on foot
Your phone hours to age 80, walked at 3.1 miles an hour, would come to 245,000 miles — 9.8 times around the Earth (one lap ≈ 25,000 miles).
28% of waking life
Of every 16 hours you're awake, 4.5 hours go to the phone.

This page's arithmetic, from your numbers.

The mechanism

Why is the phone hard to put down?

None of this needs conspiracies. Three things you can see with your own eyes, in any scrolling app:

The feed never ends.
The next items are already loaded before you ask; there is no end where you'd stop out of inertia.
The next clip starts itself.
You don't choose to continue; you choose to object, every time, to every clip.
The badges call you back.
Red dots, numbers, vibrations: interruptions someone else schedules, on your phone.

Half of British adults' time online in 2025 — 51% — flows through the services of two companies, Alphabet and Meta (Ofcom, 2026). Their businesses earn from ads: the longer you stay, the more they earn.

On how anything reaches the foreground of attention: the atlas of attention.

This week

What can you try this week?

No proof any of these works for everyone. Pick one, keep it for a week, then look at your phone's number again.

Let the phone sleep in another room.
Charge it overnight in another room and get an ordinary alarm clock. The morning starts without the feed.
Turn off social-media notifications.
Keep calls and people's messages. The rest can wait until you open the app yourself.
Set yourself a daily limit, in the phone.
Both iPhone and Android let you lock apps after a time you choose. The limit asks you every day whether you still want more.

Sources

Where do the numbers come from?

Assumptions, all in the open: life is counted as 80 years; sleep as 8 hours a day; a 300-page book as about 8 hours of reading; walking as 3.1 miles an hour; one lap of the Earth as about 25,000 miles.
The British average: Ofcom, Communications Market Report 2026 — 4 hours 30 minutes a day on personal devices, among internet users aged 18+ (49.1 million in May 2025, Ipsos iris measurement); 51% of 2025 time online on Alphabet and Meta services.
The rest is arithmetic on your numbers — you can check any figure with a pocket calculator.