I treasure my screen time (my weekly screen time report is an embarrassing number). But sometimes, even when I want to be taking a break, scrolling through all of my endless feeds can be very emotionally and mentally draining. When I want to be on my phone or computer, but don’t want to scroll myself into the void, here’s what I do instead.
Phone Games
I feel like everyone is entitled to at least one silly little phone game that they are way too into. For me, it’s the app/website Cardgames.io (right now I am going through a major Farkle phase but I have played most games on there). Whether it be a card game, an adventure game or something where you have to tend to crops, let yourself have a game or two on your phone. It’s all in good fun.
Make A Playlist
If you’re in a creative mood, check out my blog “Struggle Making Playlists? Have Some Playlist Prompts.” It could potentially give you some new ideas for ways to freshen up your music library.
Quizzes
There are two types of quizzes I frequent in my free time: personality quizzes and knowledge quizzes. Recently, I’ve been loving the Taylor Swift Sporcle quiz where you have 11 minutes to try and name every song on every album. Sporcle is a generally good resource for the knowledge/trivia based quizzes, but you can find them on all corners of the internet.
The “Wikipedia Game”
You know the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenomenon? It’s kind of like that, but with Wikipedia. As Wikipedia describes it on the Wikipedia page for the game the objective is: “Players (one or more) start on the same randomly selected article, and must navigate to another pre-selected target article, solely by clicking links within each article. The goal is to arrive at the target article in the fewest clicks (articles), or the least time.” This is fun on your own, but is especially fun racing a friend.
Catch Up On Favorite Podcasts/Current Audiobook
I feel like all I do is recommend my own blogs but I have written a blog with some podcast recommendations, as well as several blogs with book reviews (“You Have A Match,” “Tweet Cute,” “The Unhoneymooners”). But if you have your own personal favorite that you haven’t listened to in a while: do it, it’ll be worth it.
Set The Phone Down
If you’ve exhausted all of these, maybe screen time should come to a close. Or not, I won’t tell you what to do.
Here’s to no more doom-scrolling,
Caitlin
