My Habit
My issue / habit that I wanted to solve was being on my phone, which is something that I’ve always noted about myself in terms of something that I wanted to change. I never really felt like I was on my phone for a crazy amount of time, but my screentime on my iPhone would consistently show 6 hours, and I couldn’t really understand how that would happen. Once we did the first Measuring Me assignment, however, I began to grasp exactly how much I was on my phone. More specifically, I would use my phone for an hour when I woke up and an hour when I went to bed, along with little times here and there, and that just felt like lost time that I could spend doing something productive or healthy, such as sleep, read, or stretch.
My idea, then, was to track how much time I spent on my phone by noting my screentime for every hour. Specifically, I tracked my screentime usage that day and then framed my tracking around a specific binary problem: had I spent 20 minutes on my phone in that past hour? I thought 20 minutes because it felt like 20 minutes was around the point that I felt I had been just scrollng at least at some point in that hour for the sake of scrolling versus simply doing something productive or checking in on friends. Assuming I was up for about 16 hours, if I was under 20 minutes per hour, my hope would be that my screentime would be under 5:20. By tracking my usage every hour, I hoped that my screentime would go down significantly.
My Results
I tracked this over two days: Friday, January 12th, and Saturday, January 13th.
As my log reveals, I had a great day on Friday. I had long stretches without using my phone, and coincidentally, that was a day where I felt especially productive. It didn’t mean that there weren’t times when I was over 20 minutes, but in general I felt like I was relatively off of my phone, which reflected in the fact that I used my phone for less than 4 hours.
Saturday, however, was not necessarily my best day. I woke up that morning and pretty much spent all morning on my phone. More specifically, I spent 3 hours on my phone before 12:45. That kind of set me up for a relatively unproductive day, and though I was better at being off my phone the rest of it, I didn’t get that much work done. I ended up at over 6 hours of phone usage that day.
Discussion
First of all, this way of tracking felt a lot less invasive than the previous Measuring Me. 1 hour intervals seems like the perfect amount of time to really reflect on my usage of my phone. It always felt that I was very aware of when I was using my phone, and I really tried to curb it. The other end of this, however, was that when I knew I had wasted a lot of time on my phone, I dreaded the hour checkup. I knew my time would be completely messed up. It got to the point that after my survey, when I knew I had spent a lot of time on my phone, I was grateful that at least I wasn’t tracking at that point.
To me, then, it reveals that I really should continue this. Of course, being reminded every hour is a different level of stress, but it really kept me aware and accountable in a way that other things I had tried simply hadn’t. I am considering keeping this because of how good I felt it allowed me to track my phone habits, recognizing when I used my phone every hour. Of course, I did miss some points, mostly because I was completely off my phone at those points, but that’s what I wanted to happen so I wasn’t too worried. If I had to do this again, I might put an alarm for every hour to remind me to mark my phone usage – I didn’t do it here because I tried it for 15 minutes during Measuring Me 1 and found it really annoying, but hour intervals is definitely more space, and it would make my tracking more consistent.
The other thing is that my experience really revealed to me the extent to which I waste time on my phone. The worst part about Saturday was that I spent 3 hours on my phone that morning and literally do not remember a single moment of it. If that’s not a waste of time, I don’t know what is. Even on Friday, which I felt was a really good day in this aspect, it felt like the 4 hours really surprised me, but the log reveals all, and I definitely had moments where I didn’t use my time the most efficiently.
My Charts
Having reflected on my experience, below I have attached the charts that I made. The interesting thing about my charts is that they reflected different aspects of my experience surrounding my phone usage. I first did my connection circle, and that really allowed me to bring out some bigger things that revolve around using my phone and understand how they affect and are affected by using my phone. It was really interesting because it allowed me to see the habit not as something that is by itself, but as part of an interconnected set of patterns, habits, and decisions. I feel more equipped to handle this habit because of being able to see what exactly my habit of using my phones causes and is caused by.
The fishbone diagram on the other hand, solely focused on causes of the event, which really allowed me to pinpoint some specific reasons why I like using my phone. With that diagram, I specifically was able to highlight sports, which I hadn’t even really thought about as a big factor in using my phone. Specifically here, if one of my favorite teams are playing in a really important game, especially in basketball, football, and soccer (go Wiz, Commanders, and Barca/Everton), I can’t focus unless I am following in some capacity, and if I’m not watching, I’m following along to reactions, memes, etc. from that game. More generally, if there is a big game happening in these sports (think playoffs, finals, etc.) I always feel like I need to be watching and in tune – it’s history happening at that point for me, and who wants to miss that? But what that means is that I can spend so much time looking at reaction, memes, etc, like I inevitably ended up doing on Sunday when the Cowboys lost early in the playoffs once again, to the glee of the entire sports world. I don’t really know how I can reel this in – my guess is that I will just have to be more disciplined, especially knowing that I am tracking myself every hour.
