The average person unlocks their phone 96 times a day. Do the arithmetic on a 16-hour waking day and that's roughly once every ten minutes, every single day, without exception for meetings, meals, or conversations. Total daily screen time for U.S. adults is now sitting around 4 to 5 hours, and that number keeps climbing rather than leveling off.
Ninety-six isn't a willpower failure, it's a design outcome
Nobody consciously chooses to check their phone 96 times. That number is the output of years of interface design specifically built to produce it — infinite scroll, variable rewards, badge counts, all engineered by people whose job is maximizing exactly that metric. Treating 96 unlocks a day as a personal failing misreads the situation. It's closer to reading a thermostat and blaming the room for being cold.
The problem with "just don't check it"
Most self-control strategies ask you to out-will a system that was built by people running controlled experiments on exactly how to beat your self-control. That's not a fair fight, and it's not really about weakness — it's a mismatch of resources. An individual's willpower, deployed moment to moment, is competing against an entire industry's optimization budget, deployed continuously.
Where the leverage actually is
The fix that works isn't more resolve — it's changing what's available to resolve about in the first place. If the apps responsible for most of those 96 unlocks are simply not reachable during a scheduled window, there's no decision left to make, and no willpower budget to spend down over the course of a day. That's the entire premise behind Appblox's category-level, scheduled blocking: it doesn't ask you to win the fight 96 times. It removes the fight for the hours that matter most.