Breaking Bad
Disclaimer: This Blog has nothing to do with the hit Series Breaking Bad. So those who are looking for data analysis on better combinations and ratios for preparing meth can close the tab right away.
Over the past two years, I have written a bunch blogs on various different topics around movies, sports and public data. So this time for a change and to bring about a change in me I thought of conducting an experiment on myself. This blog is about that experiment, with some data, some analysis and of course lot of other crap.
The moment I decided to conduct an experiment on myself, the first thing that hit my mind was my social media usage. I do use social media extensively, I had tried several times in the past to cut short my usage but I failed every single time. So I thought this experiment would help me a lot to understand my usage pattern and help me overcome it.
Ever since I came across the dear data project, I started developing a crush on handcrafted data patterns, and I had always wanted to try that in one of my own blogs. Since this blog is entirely around me, I thought a handcrafted information design would make sense and give a personal touch to it. Plus rather than pulling usage stats from a browser or any other app I felt it would be painful to do note it down manually and that would help me understand things better in detail.
The Experimental Setup
The social media apps that I was using extensively were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Started using LinkedIn much often in the recent times because I fell into the pit of believing that checking LinkedIn often helps in crafting and propelling my career faster.
How to Read?
These were the set of markers that I used to log every time I opened one of these four sites either through the app or through a desktop. The light blue one refers to Twitter, darker blue refers to Facebook, violet one refers to LinkedIn and brown one to Instagram. The forward slash marking refers to the login made from mobile apps and the backward slash refers to the one made through desktop sites. The logs with a circle on top refer to login actions which were a result of a notification that I received on my mobile. Left-hand top corner marks the day Number and the right-hand top corner tick marks refer to whether I made a post on that day in that particular social media. I had split my day into three time zones of my own. The shining sun is from the time I wake up to the time I have my lunch. The setting sun is the time from my lunch to dinner and the moon is the time between dinner and sleep. There is no specific standard time for this and every log that is made here are relative to the time I woke up, had Lunch and dinner on that particular day. The green lines refer to the time gap between two logs or the time gap between the time I woke up, had lunch or dinner and the log. Each green line of specific length equals an hour. I understand that each marker used here refers to some political party’s logo or the other from the recent RK Nagar by-elections, but with hands, I can manage only such symbols. Oops! I made a reference to another political party.
I did run this experiment for four weeks (28 Days ) starting from 1st of December. Let’s now look at the week wise experiment results. Dec 1 was a Friday, so remember the first day you happen to see in the weekly log here starts from Friday and ends on Thursday.
Week#1 Week of Woes
I started to have a notebook with me most of the times and started making notes of the time that I log into any of these sites. This became a very painful activity, I thought I had made a very bad decision by choosing to do this blog. As It was very painful activity I myself controlled my urge and started checking these sites very less frequently than I ever used to. Since the green line referred one-hour time gap, for the logs I made at intervals of 10 mins, 30 mins etc. the green line had to be trimmed to the scale accordingly which was even more painful. (Day #1, Day #3). Hence I decided not check these sites in time intervals that were not a whole number which would ease my pain a bit.
Week #2 Forgotten Notebook
This week (days #7–10) I was travelling between Bangalore, Mysore and Coimbatore. I forgot to carry the notebook in which I was maintaining a log of. Plus since I was travelling I felt lazy to make a note of logins. hence I refrained myself from using any of these 4 sites for any of these four days except for a login on the 10th day. This week I happen to realise that I had little more self-control than I thought I had and I was much lazier than I thought I was. This week was relatively pain-free plus I was glad that I broke my habit of checking these apps right after getting up from bed in the morning (Days #1,3).
Week # The week of Zero Posts
I am a kind of person who posts a lot on social media. I like writing short jokes on current affairs. I check the news, I look out for twitter trends and will update a status around it. Plus posting doesn’t come alone I also have the habit of checking for notifications repeatedly after making a post which is a habit that I wanted to overcome for a very long time.
For a person like me passing a week without making a single post was a pretty big deal.
Week #4 The week I cared less
This week went relatively pleasant. I did not really have the urge of checking my social media accounts except for the day 24. On the day #24 there was a by-election result that announced that created a lot of sensation I logged into to make a post on FB but I could not think of any and logged out, I logged in again after an hour and wanted to post one but still, I wasn’t able to think of any. I told myself that it was okay not to have an opinion on every damn thing and logged out. I think this was a real change, as in other times I would have posted something just for the sake of posting it.
So that’s the end of my experiment and also the end of my date with data this December. This is not a kind of new year resolution. Resolution is a very big word for me plus it has a validity for only one or two weeks. But I do have a bunch of wishes. I will still continue to write things and post but only when I feel like and not because I want to. After making a post I wish to gently log out instead of staying back and repeatedly refreshing for the notifications. When I watch my favourite football team play I wish to concentrate fully on the game rather than trying to post something with #ARSMANU tag. I wish to go for a kick ass tour without leaving a trace of it in social media. I wish to give importance to the people I meet and spend time in my day to day life rather than trying to please people whom I won’t be meeting even once in a decade. I wish to live my life the real way add colour to it rather than repeatedly trying to curate and add colour and filter to a profile that is hosted on some remote server in Finland.
As I finish this blog Irony smiles at me as it knows the I will be sharing it in my social media accounts. I smile back saying that “I know.” Okay. That’s it. I shall sign off for this year. I am already exited for the upcoming year with a bunch of blogs in mind. Wishing you all a very happy and healthy New year.
Life should be driven by nature, not news or notifications.
