How Much Time a Day Should You Spend on Dating Apps?

Experts quoted by Bustle land between 15 minutes a day and a few hours a week. A single sitting of 20 to 25 minutes fits inside that, and it's the plan below. It works for two apps as well as one, if you stop opening them all day. Ben Shalom's warning is why more doesn't help: after about two hours a week, you're mostly reviewing the same people.

Bustle collected advice from dating coaches and psychologists:

• Eric Resnick, an online dating coach: for a serious relationship, try not to exceed 15 to 20 minutes a day, or every other day.
• Dr. Wyatt Fisher, a licensed psychologist: about 30 minutes on the app, several times a week.
• Aleeza Ben Shalom, a dating coach and matchmaker: 30 minutes to two hours total per week. "After about two hours weekly, you're just reviewing the same people."
• Dr. Scott Carroll, a psychiatrist: 10 hours a week is too much for someone seeking a relationship. He suggests three to four hours of swiping a week, so there's time left for in-person dates.

Those aren't rules, and they don't agree with each other exactly. But none of them lands anywhere near the average user.

A Badoo survey of its users, cited by Bustle, put the average at about 90 minutes a day, in roughly ten visits of about nine minutes each. Reincubate's data on app users is lower: men averaged 21 minutes a day and women 18, and 30% of users were active for fewer than 10 minutes a day.

So the expert range isn't a low target. It's close to where the average user in the Reincubate data already is.

Sit down and swipe properly through forty profiles and it takes six or seven minutes. Do that on two apps and you've spent about a quarter of an hour. Nobody's week is ruined by that.

What costs you is the checking. The app gets opened on the walk to the station, at your desk, in the queue for coffee, on the sofa during the adverts, and once more in bed. Each open is thirty seconds of looking and then ten minutes of being half in a conversation you're not really having.

Fifteen of those a day on one app is already a lot. Add a second account and you're doing thirty. That's the doubling men feel, and it has almost nothing to do with swiping.

Messages written while you're walking or half watching something also come out short and flat. You end up sending your worst material the most often.

Pick a time you're reliably free and give it 20 to 25 minutes. Reincubate found 41% of users are most active between 5pm and 7pm, so an early evening slot puts you on the app when others are on it.

Work in a fixed order:

1. Answer messages first, on both apps. This is the only part with a clock on it. Conversations cool, women get asked out by someone else, and a reply that comes tomorrow is a different reply. Answering the same day is what matters, not the minute.
2. Deal with likes and matches, so nothing sits unopened for a week.
3. Swipe last, and stop when you notice you're no longer reading profiles. The last ten minutes of a swiping session is a habit, not a decision.
4. Close both apps and leave them closed until tomorrow.

The most common mistake with a second app is building a second man: new photos in a different order, a bio written in a different mood.

If a photo set works, it works everywhere. Use the same photographs in the same order on both accounts. Rewrite the words to fit the box, since one app wants three short prompt answers and another wants a paragraph, but the same three things about you should come through on both.

Two different profiles also cost you information. When one account does better, you can't tell whether it was the app or the profile, because you changed both at once.

Two things.

• Distance. The app with fewer people near you gets the wider radius. That's usually the whole reason it felt dead.
• Age range, if one platform genuinely skews younger or older where you live.

Everything else stays matched. To test a different first photo, change it on one app only and leave it alone for two weeks.

There are two good reasons to be on two. You've reached the end of the queue on your main app and there's nobody new to see. Or the women on your main app aren't the ones you want, since apps cluster differently in most cities.

There's one bad reason, and it's the common one: results are slow, and adding an account feels like taking action. If both accounts carry the same photographs and the same profile, a second app buys you the same outcome twice.

One dating writer says apps are meant to complement offline dating, not replace it, and that it's important to limit usage because it can be addictive. If you're past your budget and no dates are coming, spending longer on the apps rarely fixes it. Look at your photos and your first messages instead.

Here is the version of this that most men are living. The profile is average rather than bad, the twenty five minutes exist on paper and not in practice, and the apps get a proper look on a Sunday and a handful of distracted glances the rest of the week. Two accounts do not make that worse. They make it obvious.

That is the case where handing the whole operation over does more than any schedule will. One team rebuilds the photos and the profile once, runs every app you want to be on, answers while conversations are still warm, and works the promising ones toward a date on your calendar. Both accounts get run properly every day, by someone whose job it is, and you show up to the drink.

If the twenty five minutes are genuinely there, use them in one block and you can run two apps on less attention than you are currently giving one. If they are not there, the number of apps was never the problem.