My phone is my best friend. She is smart, supportive, and beautiful. But while she didn't mind (yes, she's a she), I started to feel I was becoming too clingy. It felt like my smartphone had become an extra limb; I would get lost without that slab of metal and glass in my hand. It was time for a change.A number of things slowly began to raise those red flags. I was less and less present at social engagements or dinner with friends and family. I felt that I had to document everything that I was doing — I needed that ego boosting verification that came in the form of "likes." I actually started living by a stupid phrase I made fun of all the time: "If it's not on Instagram (or Snapchat), it's like it didn't even happen." Sometimes I fell asleep with my phone in hand. And I cared more about the life of my smartphone than my own! If my phone hit 20% battery life, I went into crisis mode.When 2016 rolled around, and everyone began making resolutions, I did too. I knew I needed more space from my smartphone — and not the storage kind. I wanted to hear more of what people were saying. I wanted to see and experience the world through my eyes, not through a carefully crafted Instagram filter. And I wanted to stop watching movies while also playing Candy Crush, insisting that I was a "two screener."I'm certainly not alone in this sentiment. It seems nearly everyone is going on a tech diet not checking emails , or finding healthier ways to consume social media. I'm not the only one struggling to unglue a phone from my hands.So just in time for those bleak middle of winter blues, when most people start to forget about how they wanted to eat less sugar, exercise more, and by absolutely no means eat gluten, I decided to start monitoring exactly how often I checked my phone, and even what I spent the most time doing on it. This, I hoped, would hold me accountable and keep me on track.First, I downloaded Checky app as this article suggested, and asked two fellow R29ers to join me. (Strength in numbers!) We were so excited to see how often we checked our phones each day. Research points out that the average person opens their smartphone 150 times a day How did we measure up?Checky said I only checked my phone once on a Wednesday, and three times on Thursday. Uhhh, that's not right.It wasn't just me — my coworkers had similar experiences. One of our beauty editors said the app reported her checking her phone 40 times on a Friday (in the realm of normal, but seemingly low) but only twice the day before. Maybe the app worked in the past, but it's in dire need of a serious update at the present time.Instead, I decided to download Hooked . This app promises a breakdown of your daily app usage. I was excited about being able to identify patterns and figure out what I could change. According to the app, on January 16th I spent one hour and 39 minutes on my smartphone, broken down like this: