About this page.

A page that turns your daily screen time into days per year. It does not judge anyone: it just wants to help you see where your time goes, and take some of it back if you feel like it.

That is the whole idea. Not a lecture about phones, and not a productivity system either. Just arithmetic you can do in ten seconds, shown in a way that is hard to argue with: a calendar, with the days coloured in.

How it started

It all began with a video by Archifemme: 4.5 hours of screen time a day add up to more than two months a year. I ran the same sum on my own phone and did not like the result. The idea that boredom is good for something, on the other hand, came from Francesco Oggiano's newsletter. Get Bored Again is an attempt to put the two together.

Why boredom

Most screen-time tools stop at the guilt. This one goes one step further and asks what was actually lost, and the honest answer is not "productivity". It is boredom: the queue, the walk, the lift, the four minutes before sleep. Nobody misses those moments, so nobody defends them.

The best evidence is not the lab studies people usually quote. Professional writers and physicists who logged their most significant idea each day reported that around one in five arrived while they were doing something unrelated, and those ideas were rated as good as the ones that came at the desk (Gable, Hopper & Schooler, 2019). A preregistered 2025 experiment found that what predicted improvement after a break was not the kind of break but how far the mind drifted during it (McDaniel, Habibi & Kaplan, 2025).

Against that: attempts to make people bored on purpose and then measure their creativity have produced results in every direction, and a 2024 review of 27 studies concluded that no clear causal effect has been established either way (Zeißig et al., 2024). Two well-known earlier experiments in this area failed to replicate. So the position this page takes is deliberately modest: plausible, increasingly well measured, not proven. If that disappoints you, it should also reassure you that nothing here is being oversold.

Where the numbers come from

• Days per year = your daily hours × 365 ÷ 24.
• Life expectancy is assumed at 80 years; "years ahead" is 80 minus your age.
• "Waking hours" assumes 16 a day; the day bar assumes 8 hours of sleep.
• Comparisons use rough averages. Time units: an eight-hour working day (220 in a working year), a two-day weekend (52 in a year), 90 minutes per dinner, 2 hours per film, 45 minutes per album, 10 hours per season of a series, 15 minutes per sunset, 20 minutes per phone call, one hour per workout, seven and a half hours per night.
• Effort estimates: 4,500h for a three-year degree (180 ECTS credits); 600 class hours to professional proficiency in a Category I language (US Foreign Service Institute); 5.5h per 300-page book, against the 12.6 a year reported by the average American adult (Gallup, 2021); 300h to learn guitar; 30h of lessons for a driving licence; 500h for a novel's first draft; a 5 km/h walking pace, 240h to cross Italy, 4h to run a marathon, 9h to fly Rome to New York; 28 days for four weeks of annual holiday; 8,000h to walk around the world (40,000 km at 5 km/h), set against the screen hours in the years ahead.
• The comparison with your parents assumes six visits a year of eight waking hours each. It is the most assumption-heavy number on the page, and the one most worth recalculating with your own life.

They are averages, not prophecies. The point is the order of magnitude, not the decimal place.

What this page does not do

No advertising, no analytics, no accounts, no third-party tracking. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The whole calculation runs inside your browser, and your screen time never reaches a server. Building an attention-economy business on top of a page about the attention economy seemed like a bad joke to be part of.

If you want to support it, there is a coffee link at the bottom of the page and nothing else. Details are in the privacy note.

Who made it

A small independent project. Corrections, better sources and sharp disagreement are all welcome: hello@getboredagain.com.