Screen Time Cost Calculator

How Screen Time Cost Calculator Works

A few hours of daily screen time barely registers day to day, but multiplied across years it becomes a genuinely large share of a life -- large enough that expressing it in familiar units (work-years, waking days, percent of a lifetime) tends to land very differently than the original "hours per day" figure ever does.

Formula & Method

Total hours is simply daily hours × 365.25 × years (using 365.25 days/year to naturally account for leap years). That total is then re-expressed several ways: total days (÷ 24); "equivalent waking days," which divides by 16 waking hours instead of 24, treating the total as if it were spent only during waking hours rather than spread thin across full days; "equivalent full-time work years," which divides by a standard 2,080-hour work year (40 hours/week × 52 weeks); and, if you provide your current age and life expectancy, percent of your remaining life, which compares the years spent on screen time to your estimated years left.

Worked Example

At 4 hours of daily screen time over 10 years: that's 14,610 total hours, about 608.8 days, or roughly 1.67 years of continuous time. Reframed as waking-hours-only, it's equivalent to about 913 waking days (2.5 years' worth of just your waking hours), and equivalent to about 7 full-time work years. For a 25-year-old with an 80-year life expectancy, that 1.67 years also works out to about 3.03% of their remaining 55 years of life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is "equivalent waking years" bigger than the plain total years figure?

Because it divides the same total hours by 16 (waking hours per day) instead of 24 (all hours per day) -- expressing the time as if it only ever happened during waking hours makes it a larger share of a shorter "waking day," which is arguably the more honest comparison, since almost no one is on their phone while asleep.

Why does the calculator use 365.25 days per year instead of 365?

It's the average calendar year length once leap years are accounted for (365 days most years, 366 every fourth year, averaging to 365.25) -- a small detail, but it keeps multi-year totals accurate rather than silently under-counting by roughly a day every four years.

Are age and life expectancy required?

No -- they're optional and only feed the "percent of your remaining life" statistic. Every other figure (total hours, days, waking-day equivalent, work-year equivalent) is calculated purely from daily screen time and the number of years, so you can skip age and life expectancy entirely if you'd rather not think about a life-expectancy estimate.

Is this meant to be an exact prediction of my future screen time?

No -- it's a straight-line projection assuming your daily screen time stays constant for the number of years you enter, meant to reframe a habit in terms that register more viscerally than "X hours a day." Actual future screen time will vary with life changes, so treat the output as a what-if illustration, not a forecast.