Bored and Brilliant: why cutting six minutes was a win

In her TED talk How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas (TED2017), radio host Manoush Zomorodi described "Bored and Brilliant", a week of daily phone challenges she ran with her podcast listeners. They tracked their phones with apps before and during the week, and she couldn't wait to see the totals. In the talk, she tells the audience what the data said.

when the data came in, it turned out that we had cut down, on average, just six minutes

Manoush Zomorodi, TED2017, 2017

The group went from 120 minutes a day on their phones to 114. She went back to the scientists she'd been interviewing feeling low, and they laughed: changing behavior in a single week, they told her, was a very ambitious aim.

The number that didn't move, and the one that did

Zomorodi's point is that the minutes were the wrong scoreboard. What changed was how people talked about their phones afterward:

Their phones had been transformed from taskmasters back into tools.

Manoush Zomorodi, TED2017, 2017

Her challenges were concrete. Day one was "Put it in your pocket": keep the phone out of your hand for a whole day and notice the reflex to check. Day three, the one people found hardest, was "Delete that app": take the one app that always pulls you in off the phone, even if only for the day. By the end, she says, 20,000 people had taken part, 90% cut their minutes and 70% said they had more time to think. Those are her project's figures, from listeners who chose to join, so read them as a report from the field rather than a trial.

What the research adds

Small average changes are what careful studies find too. In a large US trial with 1,933 adults, daily limits on six apps, set by the people themselves, cut about 22 minutes a day. The limits as set would have cut about 53; most of the gap was people snoozing them. The same trial found that roughly half of the time the limits removed moved to other apps (Allcott, Gentzkow and Song, 2022).

Minutes are also a rough test on their own. The American Psychiatric Association notes that time spent on a technology doesn't, on its own, show that use is a problem (APA, 2024). And your guess at your own minutes is shaky: a review of 44 studies found that what people report matches their logged use only loosely (Parry et al., 2021).

So count the minutes, from the phone's own log, and count something else beside them. Zomorodi closes her talk with the question worth asking each time you reach: what am I really looking for?

How this fits the phone program

The phone program starts where Zomorodi's listeners started: you describe your phone in your own words and check the numbers it already keeps. Your answers point to one of five patterns. For the one we call the Scroll, the first move is limiting the app that holds you, close to her "Delete that app" day, and later chapters plan your stop and the second app that tends to open next, which is where freed minutes leak. You leave with two habits to start with, three at most, and fourteen days to prove them, with a review on day fourteen and four one-tap check-ins by email. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: TED, Manoush Zomorodi, How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas, April 2017 Research: Allcott, Gentzkow and Song, Digital Addiction (2022) · American Psychiatric Association, What is technology addiction? (2024) · Parry et al., Logged and self-reported digital media use (2021)