Daily hours are easy to shrug off. The same number expressed in days per year and years of the life you have left is considerably harder to shrug off.
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No hidden weighting, no fudge factor. Every figure above comes from four lines of arithmetic:
| Figure | Formula |
|---|---|
| Hours per year | daily hours × 365 |
| Days per year | hours per year ÷ 24 |
| Waking weeks per year | hours per year ÷ 16 ÷ 7 (a 16-hour waking day) |
| Years of remaining life | (reclaimable hours per year × years remaining) ÷ (365 × 16) |
Years remaining assumes a life expectancy of 80. The final figure counts only the share you marked as time you'd take back — hours spent on calls, maps, music or work are not being counted against you. And it is measured in waking years, not calendar years, because the eight hours a day you spend asleep were never yours to spend anyway.
That last choice is the one that makes the number land. Two hours a day sounds like a rounding error. Two hours a day of the roughly sixteen you are actually awake is one-eighth of your conscious life, and you would notice immediately if someone took an eighth of your salary.
Screen time is uniquely bad at feeling expensive, for three structural reasons:
Nobody sits down for a four-hour scrolling session. It arrives as ninety seconds in a lift, four minutes in a queue, eleven minutes in bed. Each individual withdrawal is genuinely trivial, so there is never a moment where you feel the cost — and the total only exists in a weekly report you have learned to swipe past.
Four hours a day gets mentally filed next to "watched a film". It should be filed next to "took a second job". At four hours a day you are working a 28-hour week, unpaid, for a company whose revenue depends on you not noticing.
You never see what the reclaimed time would have become, so it never feels lost. Ten minutes a day is a language in four years. Thirty minutes a day is a marathon. An hour a day is, for most people, roughly the gap between wanting to write something and having written it.
An honest caveat, because calculators like this are easy to misuse:
The single useful thing a number like this does is convert an abstract habit into a concrete quantity — and quantities are the only things you can actually take aim at.
Intention alone almost never does, and the reason is structural rather than moral. The decision to open the app arrives several hundred times a day. To keep the habit you need to win every single one of those; to lose it you need to lose once. Nobody has that hit rate, and the failure is arithmetic rather than weakness.
What does work is removing the decision entirely:
SproutGuard is a free iOS app that does the part this page cannot: it puts the wall up. It runs on Apple's Screen Time framework, so blocking happens at system level and entirely on-device — no account, no cloud, no server that could receive your usage even in principle. It is built for adults blocking themselves, not for parents monitoring anyone.
Disclosure: this calculator is published by the developer of SproutGuard. The calculator itself is free, standalone, and works whether or not you install anything.