Turning down TikTok: mapping my digital habit ecosystem
Observing my TikTok usage over an average (pandemic) weekend
So, about TikTok…
Since the world went into lockdown last March, I’d seen myself fall into the time sink that is TikTok — at first slowly, and then all at once.
Like many people, COVID brought about an omnipresent pressure in my life that really didn’t go away: not when I was designing things at my internship, not when I was busy working on my shop, and certainly not when I was taking a break from the aforementioned two. When I took a break, it seemed, I wasn’t really taking a break (at least, not from the pandemic).
TikTok didn't fix that by any means, but it sure did go a long way in helping me forget about it, at least for a little while. The bite-sized, less-than-a-minute clips zipped by so fast that I didn’t really need to think beyond the content. There’s no dawdling by on TikTok, so there wasn’t really a need to recognize the gravity of the pandemic.
We’re nearing a year now since I first used the app, and it’s easily eclipsed all other apps on my phone in terms of time usage. Phone usage in general is something I’d like to reduce, but TikTok is easily the biggest offender here, and so I’d like to make a change.
Measuring my usage
This was a great opportunity for me to become familiar with the Screen Time feature in iOS, which provides a streamlined way to access all kinds of info related to phone usage. This method of tracking is useful for two reasons:
- There’s minimal chance of error. The phone records app usage from the time I open the app to the time I close it; any effect of having the app open but idle is reduced by the fact that my phone sleeps after a short period of inactivity.
- There’s minimal chance of bias. The meta-level experience of recognizing that you’re recording a habit naturally changes how you act (as I observed in the first go around of the Measuring Me activity). Here, the time is recorded as observed — there’s no chance for me to make the data look better than it is.
After recording over a Saturday-Sunday window, here are the resulting average usages recorded specifically on TikTok:
Some interesting trends to note here:
- I use TikTok a lot. No surprise here — what did surprise me is the amount of time I spend using the app. It appears I use the app regularly for around 2 hours a day (!!!).
- I use TikTok primarily right before I sleep. The peaks around 12 to 3am correlate with me lying in bed using the app. My sleep schedule has definitely been pretty wild since the pandemic started, and TikTok has exacerbated this. These peaks form one continuous session more or less totalling 1.5 to 2 hours, and usually end when I’m ready to go to bed.
- I also use TikTok right after lunch. The secondary peaks between 12 to 6pm are the result of me taking a break from work after lunch. These peaks are the result of a handful of sessions combined (usually a collection of 3 or 4 15–20 minute breaks at any given moment).
Modeling what I saw
The connection circle below details a brain dump of all the possible factors and aspects affecting or affected by my TikTok usage. The connections are directional and color-coded based on if they contribute to the factor (green) or contravene it (red); ambiguous contributing factors are colored yellow.
The most impacted aspects as a result of my TikTok usage were decreased productivity, less sleep, and more pressure to stay active on the app, with boredom, procrastination, and business interests being important contributing factors to these aspects.
This connection circle highlights an aspect of my TikTok usage (social pressure) that I hadn’t really thought about before — yes, I often use it like I would YouTube as a content stream to entertain myself, but I also reference it a lot in my vernacular and often exchange videos with my friends so we’re all in the loop of what we each say.
I also wanted to pull out and highlight one loop in particular from this connection circle and represent it as a feedback loop. Here, I’m looking specifically at how I use TikTok to help me sleep. It’s clear that this becomes a reinforcing feedback loop where I use TikTok until it’s very late, resulting in less sleep, which means more procrastination for me and less productivity.
These factors under normal stress would be mediated in other ways (hanging out with friends in person, doing errands, traveling, and so on) but with the need to stay at home and stay safe, all that energy ends up being channeled toward TikTok at a slower rate of diffusion.
Insights to take with me
For me, this exercise poses the question of why I hadn’t been looking at Screen Time on my iPhone more. I’m not blaming my phone for not alerting me more of my phone usage and habits, but it’s clear that I’m not taking advantage of this information in order to change those habits I don’t desire anymore. These tools didn’t exist until a growing number of dissenting voices urged Apple to consider phone addiction and usage — could there be more done to make tools like these more effective in curbing phone usage?
In the end, I like to think that my TikTok usage isn’t a bad habit per se; rather, it’s a habit I no longer desire of myself. Seeing a hard, concrete number like 2 hours and 46 minutes is a far better signal to me than simply acknowledging that I use TikTok frequently, and makes me think what more I could do in the day if I took an hour off that and used it towards something like sleep. I recognized this behavior and some contributing factors to it, which gives me at least a solid angle from which I can change things to change my behavior; that’s a win for sure.
