How much time should we pend in front of a computer (when our work depends on being online)?
I probably spend more than 10 hours a day at my computer… and I know it’s not ideal. It is actually bad.
It has quite a few negative effects – on our eyes, posture, stress levels, and overall well-being.
Even though I try to balance it with activities like going outside or exercising, it still feels like it’s not enough.
Makers, how many hours do you spend at your computer every day, and how do you give yourself permission to step away from it?
I think this is especially challenging for people working in social media. Your job requires you to scroll through endless content, deal with information overload, communicate with people, and stay constantly connected. Then after work, you often end up using social media again for your own personal interests.
How do you create healthy boundaries when being online is literally part of your job?
Replies
More than the number of hours, it's the number of screens!! 2 monitors, one laptop, one ipad the mobile, then the smartwatch, all the switching does take a toll and strain the eyes. I use a blue light filter glasses for some relief.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@roopesh_donde That feels like a distraction problem :D
@busmark_w_nika I think my gen has gone through all tech experiments and distractions. Gen Alpha/beta is born with AI. My 6-year-old gets his homework on an app. Getting them focused will be a huge opportunity.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@roopesh_donde Uff, but I think that then younger generations can be bored very fast.
Mine is 10 to 12 hours most days, a full time data job and then building products in the evenings, so I will not pretend to have solved it. Two things keep it workable. Training goes in the calendar like a meeting and nothing books over it. And I stopped counting screen time as one number, because the split matters more than the total. Hours spent building leave me tired but fine. The same hours spent scrolling leave me wrecked. Creation and consumption cost different things even on the same screen. For the social media case you describe, the always on feeling mostly comes from the checking, not the volume. Batching replies into two or three fixed windows a day and staying out of the feed between them cuts the drain without cutting the output. And on your sleep reply above, 4 to 5 hours is the one number in this thread I would actually worry about. Everything else compounds slower than that does.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs Uff, 5 hours is really a little time, We should to something about that because for me it was the same :/
@busmark_w_nika The thing that shifted it for me was accepting that the work does not fit, and then choosing what falls off, rather than taking it out of sleep by default. Sleep is the one input where the debt gets paid whether you agree to it or not. Everything else can slip a day without much cost. If a hard bedtime feels impossible, a fixed wake time is easier to hold, and the bedtime tends to follow it within a couple of weeks. And on the hair you mentioned further down, chronic short sleep and raised cortisol are genuinely linked, so I would treat that as a signal rather than a coincidence.
I spend all my working time in front of the computer. I love my work so frequently I have to force myself to stop. I realize that I have to spend time to exercise, read and connect with other people. That helps me be more productive in the working hours. So, my goal is to be productive, having quality working hours and grow as a person at the same time. Both things reinforce each other.
What about you, do you prioritize time? Do you try to work more time or less?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@narcismirandes I wanna work less, but I am not successful at it. 😭
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@eshwarsundar What does it mean? "not necessarily in front of a screen."
BetterClaw
10+ hours here too, and my spine files a formal complaint daily. My dumb-but-effective fix: a water bottle small enough that refilling it forces me to stand up every hour. Tricking yourself into movement is peak entrepreneur energy.
I easily hit 10-12 hours a day when I'm deep into building a project. It’s so hard to step away when the feedback loop of coding is so addictive!
For me, creating boundaries isn't about setting a strict timer; it’s about ruthlessly optimizing my workflows so I can actually finish my work faster.
For example, I used to waste hours going back and forth with LLMs trying to get the right code snippets or copy because my prompts were terrible. It was exhausting. Building my own local prompt generator wizard (Free AI Prompt Gen) to force myself to use structured RTF frameworks easily saved me an hour of screen time a day just by reducing that friction.
Ultimately, if you can automate the tedious parts of your job, stepping away from the computer feels a lot less stressful because you aren't leaving "busywork" behind.
The unit in the question might be the actual problem. Hours in front of a computer is not what exhausts anyone. Switches are. Ten hours on one problem leaves me fine. Three hours spread across nine problems leaves me useless, and the second one is what a normal day actually looks like. Identical screen time. Completely different day. Which is awkward for the whole category, because every screen time tool measures the thing that does not hurt. A number that goes down when you shut the laptop tells you nothing about whether the day cost you anything. If I were measuring it I would count switches per day rather than hours per day, and I would count a switch as anything that made me reload what I was holding in my head. That includes the notification you dismissed without reading, which is the one everybody scores as free. Nika, that is also a much harder product to build than a timer, which is probably exactly why nobody has built it.