BePresent: Screen Time Control

If you struggle with getting life tasks done and/or feel as though you’re wasting your life on your phone, this is absolutely the app for you. It’s affordable for pro version but the free version is still very useful/helpful. I downloaded Be Present about three months ago, after seeing an ad from its creators (I really like when the app creators are the ones hocking the product for some reason! Explaining the problem they set out to solve, it clicks in my brain) and it really helped my screen time and my focus on things outside my phone. However, I was moving and I was super broke, I paid for one month of month to month and then I wasn’t able to continue. Today, after close to two months have passed and after reviewing my screen time from the day before on the free version (which by the way is still great, not tons of limits) I decided to go ahead and purchase a year subscription and challenge myself to use it for the full year. I will see what kind of changes this might allow me to make and update my review but for now, I’m excited to see where this will take me.

I’m one of those people who clicks on my social media apps out of habit, even when I don’t really want to look at them. (I know I’m not alone here.) It’s just something to keep my mind and fingers busy. But I don’t get any joy out of it. If anything, it makes me more stressed out given the decisiveness on social media these days. So seeing those apps darken so I couldn’t click on them made me feel so free. That said, the day I started using this app, my daughter was admitted to the hospital. She has a very complex medical history, and we have a Facebook group to update friends and family on her, and so I needed to access the app several times that day to post updates. My final update came after night mode had started, and I felt so awful having to click “give up” when really I wasn’t giving up, I just needed to tell my family that she and I had arrived safely at the larger Children’s Hospital two hours from home. This wasn’t a matter of giving up. This was a matter of updating a large group of people who were very concerned about us, and I wasn’t going to put that off until morning, knowing the number of people who were waiting on an update. I really wish there was an option to give you a “freebie” on a limited basis basis (like 1-2x/month) for instances when you are logging on quite intentionally with a specific purpose. Clicking that give up button to make me feel bad because I knew I wasn’t giving up. And I wanted to turn night mode back on immediately after I posted my update, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I would love it so much more if night mode would automatically turn back on after a few minutes, or if there was a way to communicate with the app while you are choosing to turn off particular mode. 🤷‍♀️

I’ll probably continue looking for an app that works better. 1) Having to unblock whole categories of apps is not helpful. For instance, I need to listen to things while working. Sometimes music, sometimes podcasts that are only available on certain streaming platforms. But I don’t want to unblock all entertainment because then I’ll have access to things like Instagram and Reddit, which I really do want to block. I don’t want my streaming to count against my screentime because I’m not even looking at my phone. Allegedly this is an Apple issue, but the app still made it seem like if I paid for it, I would have control over what I block. 2) There aren’t actual rewards. There are advertisements. The only “reward,” besides enhanced productivity and reduced reliance on my phone, is the accrual of points, which is skewed due to item 1 above. 3) The schedules don’t work well. Sometimes they block apps, sometimes they don’t. I do all of my blocking manually. 4) There aren’t extra points for going over your blocking session. This actually ENCOURAGES me to interact with my phone more because if I want to maximize points, I have to start a new blocking session as soon as one finishes. Why not check a few apps while things are unblocked, right?! The app has promise, but definite room for improvement here.