Behavior: Skipping Real Breaks: Using phone scrolling instead of restorative breaks, such as walking, resting, and socializing:
External Introduction Document
Target User Group: Undergraduate/Graduate students (aged 18-28) who spend most of their time doing focused work (in the form of classes and studying), and who regularly use their phones during study breaks.
Key Characteristics:
- Spend long blocks on laptop/desk work
- Take frequent short breaks (every 30-90 minutes)
- High reliance on phone-based entertainment/social connection
- Experience stress/fatigue and often feel like they can’t afford long breaks
Students are relevant to this study because they are constantly balancing attention and productivity. Their breaks can often be unstructured, so it’s easy for a quick scroll break to replace restorative ones that can actually help them recharge.
We hope to learn when a “break” becomes scrolling by default, what kinds of emotions make scrolling feel like the right choice in that moment.
Create a Screener: https://form.typeform.com/to/GugLVzmY
Week-Long Diary Study Design:
We want to know when and why students default to phone scrolling during breaks, what contextual factors trigger it, and how scrolling compares to other traditional forms of breaks (in terms of energy, focus, and mood).
Participant Tasks (daily)
- Participants will log pause moments in working periods and what they did in the break (including the time, duration, and frequency)
- Complete a short end-of-day reflection (5-7 minutes)
Instead of framing it as logging breaks, we want to frame it as moments where you paused from work. This lowers defensiveness towards scrolling in breaks, and instead asks the participant to explain what happened when they paused. This study will be event-triggered, not schedule-triggered, so we ask participants to log when something noticeable happens.
The pause-logging will help us collect logistical data about breaks and the frequency/nature of them. The end-of-day reflection will provide us with content data, specifically the participants’ thoughts and feelings related to how they utilize their “pause” time between work.
Data Collection Plan:
Format:
We will collect data using a simple table that the participants can fill out throughout the day. The goal is to make logging as lightweight as possible by focusing on observable details rather than long written responses. This lowers the barriers for participants to log in frequently.
Break Log Table (To be filled in during the day)
| Date | Time | Duration | Actiion | Before I paused, I felt… |
End of day reflection:
At the end of each day, participants will complete a short reflection prompt which captures the why behind behaviours and how breaks felt overall. We will send them these end-of-day questions for them to write up and send back to us.
End-of-day Questions:
- Did you feel like you took enough breaks today? Why or why not?
- What did you typically do during breaks between work sessions?
- Which break felt most restorative for you?
- How did your break choices affect your energy and focus/mood afterward?
Reminder System:
We will check with participants if they agree to get email reminders throughout the day. We will send three email reminders per day to reduce forgetting and help support compliance with the study.
- Late morning reminder: we will prompt participants to log any pause moments so far (around 11 am)
- Mid-afternoon reminder: prompt participants to log additional pause moments
- Evening reminder: prompt participants to complete the end-of-day reflection and any other pause moments.
We will ask participants to send us their submissions daily as an email response to the reminders. This will ensure that they are not back-filling their responses and are instead actively engaged with their study.
Our team will review submissions daily to confirm that participants are logging consistently. We can also look for any confusion as to what constitutes a pause moment and intervene if necessary.
Here are the study materials (emails and docs for external communication with the participants)
Here is the pre-interview script
Looking forward to completing our study!
Anavi, Felix, Vaishnav, Lour Drick
(Team Axolotl)
