You spend 5 days per year pulling your phone out of your pocket

At the Google I/O conference, David Singleton, Director of Engineering for Android, glibly threw it out there that, on average, Android users pull their phones out of their pockets 125 times per day. That sounds like a lot, but once you factor in checking for notifications, checking the time, fiddling with audio, sending messages, making calls, and just general boredom, you realise that all of that interaction adds up.

So, how much time does all of this add up to? It’s difficult to say for sure. Sometimes you can grab your phone pretty easily, others it can take a bit of manoeuvring to pull it out, or find it in a bag. Let’s give it an overall average of 5 seconds. 5 seconds to begin moving your hand, pull out your phone, put it in front of your face and activate the lock screen.

Assuming you’re reliably that fast, you’ll waste 10 minutes every day just pulling your phone out. Of course, once you do you have to put it away again. Let's allow another 5 seconds, driving the number up to 20 minutes in total.

That’s 20 minutes per day, or 5 days per year, of just trying to gain access to, or put away, your phone without actually interacting with it.

If ever there was an argument for smartwatches then this is it. If checking notifications on your wrist can even halve that number, then that’s another 10 minutes a day you can buy for a one-time purchase of $250.

Over two years that time saved works out to 121.7 hours, or that 5 days number form earlier. Even if cutting down on wasted time is your single and only reason for buying a smartwatch, then it still sounds like a good deal to us.

Check out David's Android Wear I/O address

Alex Angove-Plumb

Digital Content Editor

Alex Angove-Plumb is a Digital Content Editor at WhistleOut and an award-winning journalist. He's been in the tech publishing industry since 2010, putting him a few short years away from the title of Grizzled Ancient in his chosen profession. He was an original WhistleOut-er before running NBN Co's corporate blog for two years, then moving on to a lengthy stint at CHOICE. Now he's come home.

Read full bio