Catherine Thorne, Period 2, 11/4/22

 Atomic Habits & Growth

• At this current point in time, what specific standards have you set for yourself? 

• How and why did you come to craft these standards? 

• How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving these standards?

• How do you assess yourself?  What adjustments do you make? How often?

In our modern society, almost everyone has a phone. While those who are older and were born before the age of the internet might use their mobile devices primarily for communication, younger generations are increasingly becoming addicted to their phone screens. Unfortunately, I am a part of this epidemic. My screen time at the start of last year was worryingly high, reaching upwards of twelve hours a day. That’s 50% of every day spent looking at my phone. When I saw this statistic from my phone, I was shocked. How was I getting anything done if I spent over half of the day browsing through various apps on my phone? The answer is that I wasn’t. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, learning was entirely online and classes were a lot shorter, leaving more of my day free. Instead of pursuing an interesting or useful hobby, I would lay in bed and scroll mindlessly through my phone, hours passing me by. My excessive screen time didn’t negatively impact my schoolwork to a large extent, though, because of the increased free time. However, that changed when I entered junior year. As school returned to almost normal, with in-person classes, the length of classes and the amount of homework drastically shot up. The transition to regular school was especially hard because of the adjustment from hours of free time to seemingly none at all. Even though I suddenly had a lot more work but less time to do it, my bad habits had become part of my routine. I would get home from school and, instead of starting my homework, open various social media apps. These apps are made to be addictive, constantly showing you new and engaging content to keep you on there longer. TikTok, for example, has an algorithm on their “For You” page that specifically tailors the videos you see to what your interests are so you can keep scrolling for the next video in a never ending stream. I was addicted to these platforms and the hours of entertainment they could provide.

School assignments that should have taken me no more than an hour and a half to complete were taking me double that amount of time. I sometimes found myself stuck to my phone until nine o’clock at night before I would even attempt to start my homework. This would force me to stay awake until the early hours of the morning to finish everything I had to do. I would get less than five hours of sleep every night, which would make me very tired the next day and unable to concentrate on my classes. I knew I would need to implement some changes if I wanted to be more productive.

First, I started by looking at the statistics my phone provided to determine exactly which apps I was spending the most time on. The main ones I identified were Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok. I then used a feature on my phone that allowed me to set app timers on these, which would lock me out after I used all the minutes in the limit I created. I started with around three hour limits for each, a little less than how much I was currently using them for. Every few days I would try to reduce the time allotted for each by about five minutes. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as simply setting timers to decrease the time I spent on these apps. Often, I would find myself in the middle of a video when the app would close and tell me that my time was up. It was incredibly frustrating to suddenly lose access to what I was watching, so I would take advantage of a loophole in the settings that allowed me to simply change how much time I was given on the app. I would cheat by extending the time limit by a few more minutes every time it locked me out. As time went on, though, I became better at sticking to the limits I set for myself. One thing that really helped was setting alerts that would warn me when I only had a few minutes left so the app closing wasn’t too abrupt.

Now, I’m proud of how much progress I’ve made. My screen time has been cut by around seven hours, to only about five hours per day. Instead of spending over three hours on Instagram, I currently spend no more than thirty minutes. Compared to before, I find myself being more productive and starting my homework earlier. This has allowed me to see an improvement in my sleep schedule and how many hours of sleep I get, though it’s still not the recommended amount. There’s certainly still more room for growth, especially when it comes to phone usage on weekends, when I’m less strict with myself about maintaining lower screen time. Nevertheless, reducing the amount of time I spend staring at my phone screen every day has had a positive and noticeable impact on my daily life.