Practice One Hour Away From Your Phone — The Most Common Answer Was 60 Minutes

Search for how to spend time away from your phone and the advice usually starts with giving it up for a day. But anyone who could clear a whole day was not the person searching in the first place.

Working out whether your use is a problem at all is covered in a 10-item self-check. This article is about the step after that: building one hour as a unit and repeating it.

The most common answer was 60 minutes

Job Soken surveyed 606 working adults in Japan and asked the 450 who said they overuse their phone both how long they use it and how long they could go without touching it.

Question	Mean	Median	Mode
Daily phone use	264.7 min	216.5 min	300 min
Time able to go without touching it	197.2 min	120 min	60 min

The second row is the interesting one. The mean is 197.2 minutes, but the most common single answer was 60 minutes, and half the respondents sat below 120. Read the mean alone and it looks like three hours should be comfortable; the largest group of people actually landed on one hour. Why a mean and a mode drift this far apart is covered in self-reported phone time is not measured phone time.

Among those same 450 people, 88.8% said they feel uneasy in an environment without their phone. Make a whole day your first unit and that 88.8% shows up before any benefit does. One hour — the length the largest group named themselves — starts from something most people have already done by accident.

There are shorter and longer units either side of it. The restless few minutes when the phone is out of reach are covered in what to try when you feel uneasy without your phone, and the full-day trial run in how to try a digital detox for exactly one day. One hour sits between them.

Pick the slot, then decide what stays on

The first decision is not the length but where the hour goes. Most candidates fall into five slots.

Slot	What it has going for it	Where it breaks
Getting home until dinner	Arrives at nearly the same time daily	Collides with catching up on messages
The hour after dinner	You can bring the household into it	Drifts into TV and video
The hour before bed	Pays you back in sleep	The hour your hand reaches hardest
Weekend mornings	Easy to find a full hour	Disappears on weeks with plans
One leg of the commute	The destination ends it for you	Transit apps give you a reason to unlock

The test is not which slot sounds easiest. It is whether it arrives at the same time every day. An hour you have to place fresh each day costs you a decision before it costs you anything else, and the decision is what stops first.

Decide what stays on at the same time. Keep calls, messages, maps, payments and your alarm; switch off only the feed and short-video apps. Make yourself unreachable for the hour and the unease behind that 88.8% grows larger than the practice, which is how this ends on day two.

Decide what fills the hour before you free it

Clearing an hour leaves you with an empty hour. Without something in it, the phone simply comes back.

SHIBUYA109 lab surveyed 574 people aged 15–24 in Japan (February 2026) and found 62.2% feel worn out by their phone and 67.6% want to cut their social media time. More to the point, over 70% said they already do something to put distance between themselves and the phone — walking (20.2%), reading (20.2%) and going to the cinema (16.4%).

What those three share is that they run about an hour and make the phone awkward to pull out mid-way. Errands that occupy your hands or your legs work better than ones where you sit and wait. Building a list of your own is covered in what to put in the time you free up.

Keep the record to two columns

This is practice, so you want the repetitions visible. Record exactly two things:

• The date
• Whether the hour happened (a tick or a cross)

Do not time yourself. Writing down how many minutes you lasted means checking the clock, which hands you a reason to unlock the phone.

Two weeks gives you 14 rows. What you read there is not your streak but how many ticks there are. Seven or more out of 14 means you chose the slot well. Three or fewer takes you to the next section.

What to change when it is not working

Your hand reaches at around the 40-minute mark every time. Drop to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes sustained for two weeks gets you further than one hour done once. Go back up after the repetitions are there.

It only breaks on the same weekday. The slot collides with something in your week. Make that day a no-practice day and leave the row blank instead of marking a cross. Counting impossible days as failures makes the record the thing you quit.

The hour works, then you spend 30 minutes on the phone right after it. Nothing was decided for the moment it ends. Pick one action to follow it — get in the shower, do the washing up, start getting ready for bed. One is enough.

The record itself does not survive. Write 14 dates on paper in advance and add a tick on the days it worked. Keeping it in an app means opening the app, and opening the app means opening the others.

Start today

Pick one slot from the five above and set tomorrow’s time. Write out the five things that stay on (calls, messages, maps, payments, alarm) and choose one thing to fill the hour. Put 14 dates on a sheet of paper and tick the days it happens. In two weeks, count the ticks, not the streak.

Sources

• Job Soken (Persol Career), “2024 Survey on Smartphone Dependence.” 606 employed adults in Japan aged 20s–50s (registered JobQ Town users), online survey conducted 6–11 November 2024. Among the 450 who said they overuse their phone: daily use mean 264.7 min / median 216.5 / mode 300; time able to go without touching the phone mean 197.2 min / median 120 / mode 60; 88.8% feel uneasy without their phone: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000227.000013597.html
• SHIBUYA109 lab (SHIBUYA109 Entertainment), “Survey on Attention Detox Among Gen Z.” 574 people aged 15–24 in Japan, online survey conducted February 2026, published 12 March 2026. 62.2% feel worn out by their phone, 67.6% want to reduce social media time, and distancing behaviours included walking 20.2%, reading 20.2%, cinema 16.4%: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000403.000033586.html

This article summarises published survey findings and is not medical advice or a diagnosis.