Let’s say you have 3 hours at home in the evening with your family. How much of that time is spent checking your emails from work? How much is spent playing with your 4-year-old child? Too much. Not enough. If you had the same answers, the people at UNICEF Sweden may have a solution for you. Playtimer is an app “designed to help parents work-proof playtime.” You use the app to set aside a defined amount of time to play with your child and activate it by taking their photo. The phone is then “locked” until the time ends and you take another photo of your child to prove (using facial recognition) that you’ve spent the elapsed time together. Picking up your device in the meantime to check an email will sound an alarm. But do parents really need an app to force them to spend quality time with their children? Surely you have a problem bigger than time management if you need to rely on this app to regulate your precious peek-a-boo time. Indeed, it would seem that indignation at the app’s questionable necessity is more powerful than its actual functionality. After all, the notifications on your device aren’t actually blocked while it’s locked, and the alarm can be cancelled at the push of a button. The app is merely a token deterrent, so why bother? UNICEF has a pretty good poker face about promoting the app based on its functionality, but they do state the purpose of the app is to raise awareness about their “Children’s Rights and Business Principles.” So Playtimer is rightfully a PR piece, only disguised as a lifehacking app. By challenging us to consider whether we’d need this sort of digital intervention to regulate our work-life balance, it’s arguably done its job before you even open the app. By DDB Toronto Senior Account Executive, Colin Brown