Weekend Habits

Recently, the top of my reading list has been a book called Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zamordi. The point of this book is to get us away from our phones or at least make us more aware of how much we use our phones. The book has an activity that requires an app on the phone to be open at all times that tracks how many times you pick it up, how much screen time throughout the day there is and creates goals for you if you wanted to make a change in usage habits. This app inspired me, raised so many questions and created a whole new thought process for me. 

Over the weekend I decided to do exactly what the app did only in secret. My boyfriend is not the type to be on his phone all the time, or so I thought. Keeping up the best I could watching how many times he looked at his phone and trying to keep up with how long he stayed on was such a challenge but I did the best I could and what I found was amazing. I compared my secret observations to my own apps findings about me and compared the two. 

I thought the results from the app would be a bit skewed because I am at school all day and after school I have work so would it really be a proper analysis of how much I would usually be on my phone?  The weekend was a better time to test this out. Friday was the first day I tested this out. I did have three classes Friday as well as work but this was the result of Friday for me.

I reached the goal of exactly 40 pickups and spent three hours and twenty minutes on my phone. Not only does this shock me because of how busy I usually am on Fridays, but this makes up for almost two movies. The amount of things that could have been done during this time seem almost endless. Since I was gone all day, I wasn't able to keep an eye on my boyfriend and his phone habits. 

Surprisingly, Saturday’s pick ups and times were a lot less than Friday. I was off of work all day long and was getting ready for a party later that night. This is weird to me. The day that I have less things to do and way less places to be is the time I'm not actually on my phone. Does this make my device something of a distraction? More for play and less for work? Or can we blame the constant updates on Coronavirus from the school and my family making sure that I am okay and they don't need to start planning my funeral anytime soon? I started to keep track of how many times my boyfriend picked up his phone on Saturday and there were many times that I know I missed, but from what I recorded he picked up his phone 28 times and with all the separate times combined, had an average screen time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Of course these numbers are not exactly accurate but from what I could see and catch, these were his numbers. 

Sunday there was a difference in what we usually do for the weekend. Sunday was a recovery day, lazy day, self help day, mental reboot day, whatever you'd like to call it. The time on my phone decreased significantly because I was asleep until about 3pm and once I was awake, we just watched movies all day long. Although we are  talking about the art of distraction through the phone, can we include the power that Netflix seems to hold over us? Like some magical spell cast upon us to make us watch an entire season of a show in one sitting and not even feel guilty about it. I think this is the same idea that Zomordi has about cell phones and how much mindless time we spend looking at the tiny screen without a second thought to what we are actually doing. 

So the real question here is, does the phone that we hold on to for every event in our life really serve a purpose? Do we use it to keep up with important updates that we could literally turn to see on every TV? Or do we use it to take our minds somewhere other than work when we really need to focus on getting things done? If we take into account how much we use our phones as a reward after doing something difficult like work, homework, grocery shopping etc., we use our phones and social media as something to reward our good behaviors. It's a distraction, it's a habit that we can't seem to break, it's a reward, its work, it's good, its bad, it's everything, and because we make it our everything, we have now created an entire life around our tiny little screens.