For Measuring Me Take 2, I decided to track my habit of mindless scrolling (like many of my classmates) for two days starting on Saturday 1/10 and ending on Sunday 1/11. I personally define mindless scrolling as any scrolling that I do without a clear reason/goal in mind, which differs from doomscrolling because of the lack of emphasis on consuming negative content. Instead of setting hourly reminders for myself, I chose to rely on the iPhone screentime functionality for this exercise, which allowed me to track scrolling in unexpected hours. I felt that the intrusiveness of 15 minute/hourly alerts would make me more prone to mindless scrolling and did not accurately reflect my actual mindless scrolling habits, hence my switch to a new logging method for this activity.
The results were quite surprising to me and feel almost too good to be true. Before I go into detail about my learnings and reflections, here’s a log of my scrolling:
Sunday 1/10
- 12:21 pm – 12:49 pm – I had just woken up. I have a habit of scrolling on my phone first thing in the morning to catch up on news and funny tweets that I missed overnight. I also think this helps me ease into my day by giving me a mellow activity to do first thing in the morning and gradually wake up — definitely can find an alternative that is more beneficial.
- 1:02 – 1:08pm – I got back in bed after brushing my teeth and scrolled for a few minutes more. Truly did not have a reason/goal for this, it just happened out of habit.
- 1:53 pm – 2:02 pm – I was spending some time on my computer finding recipes and planning my meals for the week and felt a bit frustrated, so I went on my phone and scrolled for a bit to try to come up with some more unique recipes.
- 5:02 pm – 5:06 pm – I was in the car and on my way back from climbing. It feels instinctual to just pull out my phone and browse mindlessly when I’m in a car and can’t do much.
- Total: 47 minutes
Monday 1/11
- 3:57 – 3:58 pm – I had a meeting at 4 and felt a bit nervous, so I wanted to scroll a bit to distract myself, but I ended up just getting ready for my meeting after a quick scroll.
5:56 – 5:58 pm – I finished my unanticipated 2 hour long meeting and just needed a quick scroll to wind down and relax before I start doing my schoolwork. - Total: 3 minutes
Although these results may cause a bit of skepticism, I can think of multiple factors that led to my surprising data. Referring back to the reading for the sketchnote, it’s easier to break/build habits by changing our environment and the stimulus we received. A few weeks ago, I decided to 1) uninstall instagram on my phone 2) switch my phone to grayscale. Though I still have Reddit and Twitter installed and admit that I have partially redirected my mindless scrolling to these apps that are less affected by the grayscale filter, Instagram was my biggest problem and I changed my environment to make reels more inaccessible and less stimulating. I also simply had more fun/important activities to do during this observational period — on Sunday, I went rock climbing for a few hours and spent way too much time playing video games at night. On Monday, I had to catch up on sleep, spend about 7 hours on grading/meetings and frantically start homework that I was supposed to work on over the weekend. I simply didn’t have that much time to waste on this low-effort activity that rarely makes me react positively.
Although I seemed to have observed myself on my outlier days, I wonder what my scrolling statistics would look like if I turned my outlier days into my regular days. This takes a lot of commitment which I’m not completely sold on yet, but I was really glad that I did my sketchnote before I wrote this write-up since it helped me connect my recent voluntary changes to my environment to changes in my behavior. If I were to observe myself again, I would extend the observational period and make sure that I summarize my activities for the day to better explore activity level’s impact on my mindless scrolling.
Model 1:
Model 2:
