Did you pick up your phone to read this article? If you did and you’ve got Checky, your precious pocket computer already knows. That’s right, Checky tallies the times you thumb open your device.
The app that tells you you’re using too many apps comes from a company called Calm, which hopes to improve our life/internet balance. They do that first by recording the number of times we pop our heads out of the real world and into the digital one. And yes, checking Checky adds to your tally.
Putting this irony aside, in a high-tech society and an even higher-tech city, I have doubts about how much Checky can really contribute to the problem of device abuse. We’re already well aware of and conflicted about our “phone addiction" (a 2013 study shows that we look at our phones more than 150 times a day) and its implications. But what’s a good number of checks, and is too much checking bad for our health or the health of our social interactions?
Checky can’t answer these questions for us, but promises to least slap a staggering number on our nervous tics. Shame is a powerful tool, but personally I find it to be a lousy motivator. Unlike fitness trackers, which encourage more steps or activity and gently point out that you’d better take a walk, there is no apparent positive reinforcement to use Checky.
That could change: perhaps trends gathered by the app will make connections to health and happiness or guide our device use. For now, though, I’ll be gamifying Checky the only way I know how: by playing for the high score. I’ll just keep checking Checky to see how many times I’ve checked it, and then I'll win.
[Via: Valleywag, TechCrunch; photo via Thinkstock]