habits

How long do you spend looking at your phone? More than three weeks a year, according to new figures that indicate how amazing it is you haven't permanently cricked your neck.

Mobile-phone insurance Web site MobileInsurance.co.uk asked 2,314 phone owners how much time they spent each day sending texts, making calls, using apps and games, or doing anything else on their phones. The average answer is 90 minutes per day spent poking and prodding their blower.

That's 32,850 minutes a year, or 22.8 days. Over the course of the average person's life, that's 1,414 days -- 3.9 years -- spent squinting at a little piece of glass and plastic.

Read more of "You spend 23 days a year on your phone, say new figures" at Crave UK. … Read more

We are big fans of creating lists to keep us focused on our daily goals, so you can imagine our delight in coming across Good Habits, an iPhone app that lets you create and maintain daily reminders to ensure that your goals are being met. We love its simple design and motivational technique for turning our goals into daily habits.

Good Habits opens with a blank page to enter your daily reminders. To help you get started, an Information button offers a visual walkthrough of how to read the task once it's added. To add a task, first name … Read more

It seems that when Jerry Seinfeld was starting out, he got himself a big wall calendar draw a red X in the square for each day in which he sat down and wrote new material. He liked seeing a chain of red X's develop and used it as a motivational tactic. Don't break the chain!

You can use this same motivation to be more productive or healthier or what have you, but you don't necessarily need Jerry's wall calendar or red pen. With free iOS app Good Habits, you can use your iPhone to keep track … Read more

When it comes to certain diseases -- think heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers -- some basic lifestyle changes are the best preventive medicine.

And while most of us know to eat a balanced diet, exercise, and abstain from smoking, it can be far more motivating to make healthy changes if we also know we're prone to certain diseases.

Enter Zuum, a free new iPad app that estimates your risk of common diseases and personalizes tips to prevent them and improve your overall health.… Read more

We all have habits to overcome, and we all know that Wilson's weakness is text messaging and abusing social networks, but what about me and Jeff? On today's show, you'll learn how Jeff overcame his filthy nail-biting and why I almost went bald at age 8.

It's challenging to differentiate between a habit and an addiction, but it's safe to say that an addiction is a behavioral pattern that escalates in frequency and advertises a lack of control. Smoking is one of the most pervasive examples of addiction in our society, but according to our first story of the day, text messaging may be the key to cessation!

According to new research at the University of Oregon, it may be possible to inhibit an individual's response to cravings brought on by addiction through reminders delivered via media like text messages.

"Research participants were prompted by eight text messages per day for three weeks to document their ongoing cravings, mood, and cigarette use" during the quitting process, the university said, and these messages may have helped some people curb their desire to smoke. Now if we can only find a way to help Wilson with his Facebooking...

A new book called "Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff" by Chris Fehily serves as an instruction manual… Read more

Entertaining America is our No. 1 job at CBS, so staying on top of the latest home entertainment gadgets and technological trends is central to everything we do. Times change, strategies shift, yet certain themes persist. Time and time again, platform innovations have sparked revolutions in programming, from radio to television, black-and-white TV to color, standard-definition programming to HD. With each breakthrough technology comes new potential for creative storytelling and an enhanced home entertainment experience.

Here's a list of three noteworthy trends we've got our eye on in today's digital home.

The Internet is a crazy place, and sometimes people--your kids, your spouse, your employees--just can't be trusted to stay out of trouble there. Fortunately for you, there's XPCMonitor Family Safety. This is without a doubt the most comprehensive Internet usage monitor we've ever seen. Whether you're keeping an eye on your children or doing some snooping, XPCMonitor Family Safety delivers.

The program's interface is quite intuitive, with its major features organized in tabs. And my, what features it has. The screen snapshot feature takes a screenshot every 30 seconds (or at intervals specified by the … Read more

Analysis of your sleeping habits (or perhaps, lack of) usually involves an overnight stay at a hospital where you are covered in wires and surrounded by machines. However, in 2003 three sleep-deprived students at Brown University in Providence, R.I., thought that consumers should be able to monitor their own health.

Enter the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, a device that lets uses measure, track, and analyze their sleeping patterns at home.

It's a gadget that, according to Zeo, functions like a professional sleep monitor, but with only two parts: a headband and a wireless receiver designed as an alarm … Read more

Cuil, the new and "improved" search engine created by Google veterans, has failed abysmally to make a dent against its alma mater, Google, according to TechCrunch. Clearly something other than a full-frontal assault is going to be needed to displace Google as the search leader.

But why is Google the search leader?

Tim O'Reilly points to Google PageRank as the "Google's breakthrough in search" that "quickly made it the undisputed search market leader." Maybe, but consumers don't think that way. My parents' use of Google actually has little to nothing to … Read more