'Moment' App Measures Your Digital Addiction

For those of you who compulsively check your Instagram and Twitter feeds more than you’d like to admit, this one’s for you. Moment is an app that measures your level of digital addiction by
measuring how much you use your phone.

The idea came about when Kevin Holesh, the app’s creator, decided to build something to manage his own virtual addiction. As he explains on a blog post, he and his fiance’s nights had become consumed by their addiction.

“Relaxing meant whipping out our iPhones and catching up on the latest happenings in social media. Her drug of choice is Instagram. Mine is Twitter. We stopped doing fun and productive things and chose the path of least resistance.”

Holesh wanted to find a happy medium between his cell phone use and reality. “I knew I wasn’t going to smash my iPhone with a hammer in protest and then go live in the woods to find
myself. My goal was to find a balance of connected and disconnected that was right for me.”

In the spur of the moment…came Moment.

It measures the time you spend on the phone weekly. In theory, making the user aware of how many minutes they spend on their phone would help them lower their usage.

Holesh told TechCrunch that people don’t realize how much time they stare at the small screens. He conducted an experiment where he asked a group of people what their daily usage was. Most responses averaged about 50 percent less than what the usage actually was.

Moment’s recent release starkly contrasts last week’s Google’s I/O conference, where many of the presentations were focused on having more devices, such as the new Moto 360 watch, immersing you into the realm of notifications and integration with the hardware. Google has already filed patents for technologies to create a contact lens with a built-in camera.

“I’m still addicted to being distracted. I can’t stand to be bored,” says Holesh. “But since using Moment, I’m starting to crave time without my iPhone now. I enjoy plugging Walden into my dock in my office and leaving it there for the night. Texts and SnapChats be damned!”

**Writer’s Note: While writing this article I checked my phone half a dozen times.