Keep tabs on how often you check your phone with Checky

Just how many times a day do you check your phone? If you aren't afraid to find out the answer, give Checky a whirl, a free app for iOS and for Android. It may help you curb your habitual phone-checking habits and let you enjoy the rest of the world around you and your electronic device.

When you launch Checky for the first time, it will ask you to allow the app to use location data so it can accurately track your phone usage. You then just need to let the app run in the background and let it count the number of times you check your phone. I worried that Checky might be a drain on my battery, but its battery usage was small a percentage -- between 1 percent to 5 percent -- of my overall usage.

To find out how many times you have checked your phone today, just open the app. It shows you your current count, which you can tap to share if you have entered into some sort of master of your (digital) domain context with friends or your spouse. Below the count for the day, Checky lists yesterday's count. At the bottom of the screen is a bar graph that shows the number of checks for the past week.

Tap the button in the upper-right corner to see a map view of where you have checked your phone. The settings button in the upper-left corner lets you disable a daily notification of yesterday's phone-check count. You can also choose to be notified when Checky stops running.

A banner ad runs along the very bottom of the screen for the developer's meditation app. There is no ad-free paid version of Checky.

Source: PureWow via Lifehacker.