Tacking Messenger Usage
Measuring Me 2
Individuals in their teens and early 20s spend about two hours a day texting. We find it more convenient to text someone than to call them. We find it more convenient to decrease human contact or put it behind a barrier where we are in control. I think that we have become too dependent on texting for human contact.
Therefore, I decided to track my texting habits across two days. The first, I will be spending alone in my room and the second I will be spending with my friend.
I wrote down every time I was on Messenger (my main messaging app) and the time I spent there. I also documented long spans of time when I did not text. Moreover, for each of those situations, I wrote some notes reminding myself about the reason behind my action or my emotion. Here is the result:
From these measurements and observations, I created a connection circle depicting correlations between Messenger usage and other behaviors.
From the connection circle, we see two very interesting positive feedback loops occurred.
The first being how free time is spent. As I prioritized exercising over texting, I was able to spend more of my free time outdoors. I initially thought that this will reduce my productivity as it will reduce the amount of time spent studying. However, as I spent more time exercising, I realized that I was more focused during my working hours. I was able to accomplish a lot more and feel more energized doing it.
The second being the impact of working with friends. When I work with friends, there is accountability to my behavior. As I sense that my behavior is monitored, I reduce my own distractions by turning my phone to do not disturb. This results in less time texting which gives me more time to hang out and work with friends.
Interesting Takeaways
Texting is much more consuming than it feels. Every time, I underestimated the time it took to text. If I removed texting entirely from my day, I could have enough time to exercise or to spend more time with my friends.
One of the most interesting conclusions for me, is to plan a time to exercise in the morning. The more energized I start my morning the less consumed I am with texting.
Small changes such as app time monitoring, silencing notifications, and closing the messenger tab on chrome improved my productivity and mood.
Finally, working with friends is a lot more exhilarating and productive. Breaks can be spent chatting or walking rather than texting. Time consuming social-media-related activities can be removed entirely given good accountability.
For Next Time
I would try different methodologies to reduce texting. For instance, having messenger notifications come in once every hour. I could also add friction by having messenger automatically log out of my account. Therefore, every time I would like to check my texts, I have to log in again. I could also try hiding the application. This will reduce “mindless clicks” and will ensure that I have a purpose every time I open the app.
I would also try spending more time with friends since that seemed to reduce my texting by a large margin. This time, however, I would spend the entire day together and see if the accountability measure becomes less effective.
Moreover, I would like to try to examine the correlation between being or exercising and texting patterns. From this initial experiment, it seems that exercising reduces my need for texting. Exercising also gives me more energy to be productive.
