Description of Experience
The habit I tracked for this assignment was my use of short-form content, specifically moments in my day when I was scrolling through TikTok or Instagram Reels. I tracked my behavior over the span of three days and used a structure of logging every 15 minutes. Logging my experience was difficult because I had to constantly remember to record what I was doing. I found that having to log would break my trance of mindless scrolling, allowing me to be more cognizant of what I should be doing instead—my homework.
Something I would do differently is incorporate a pinging system instead of relying on myself to log every 15 minutes. An idea would be to ask a friend to randomly ping me throughout the day to check what I am doing. Overall, I learned that I spend a considerable amount of time on TikTok. I kind of suspected this from my seven hours of daily screen time, which was the motivation behind tracking this behavior. Now, I feel like I want to delete social media, but that may be a bit extreme.
In my connection model, I found an interesting connection between doing my homework and using TikTok/Instagram reels. I found that when I was doing my homework, I thought about using TikTok, and when I was scrolling, I thought a lot about doing my work. I found a bidirectional causality between these two things. I also found that whenever I got bored I would start scrolling.
As a result of my earlier observation, I created a feedback loop for my second Model. I found that when I was scrolling, I would get bored which led me to begin my work. But then I felt like I needed a break for all my productivity (all of 20 minutes) or I would get bored from work and start scrolling. And this cycle would repeat anytime I was doing my homework.
