Relationship with your phone
Screen time totals get all the attention, but they miss the more revealing question, which isn't how long, it's where. A phone that goes everywhere with you — including into the one room historically reserved for being completely alone — isn't just a device you use a lot. It's a device that has stopped having any boundaries at all.
Most relationships, including the one you have with an object, are defined by the boundaries around them. You don't bring your laptop into the shower. You don't take work calls at a funeral. The absence of a rule for the bathroom isn't because it's a low-stakes exception — it's because the phone arrived faster than any boundary-setting could keep up, and by the time anyone thought to ask whether it should go everywhere, it already did.
There's a specific tell here. People who happily admit to too much screen time overall will often resist the suggestion that the bathroom specifically should be off-limits — not because it's a bigger ask, but because it requires noticing the behaviour in the moment, rather than reviewing a number at the end of the week. Screen time totals are abstract. A wooden box on the door is not.
It's also worth asking what a phone with no boundaries is quietly replacing. Uninterrupted solitude used to have a default location, and for a lot of people, the bathroom was quietly it. Once a phone occupies that space too, there isn't an obvious place left where you're reliably alone with nothing pulling at your attention.
None of this requires a dramatic digital detox. It requires one boundary, in one room, that doesn't depend on you remembering to enforce it yourself at the exact moment you're least likely to.
And that's why I urge you, for the sake of the human race and your last remaining scrap of solitude, to consider any product that draws that boundary for you, permanently, without requiring willpower. We happen to make one — drop it. It's not a breakup. Just a boundary.