I find myself more often than not using technology for personal use rather than academically. Everyday I can find myself using all sorts of social media like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. None of this really have anything to do with academics and are more for my leisure and social interaction use. Although it is more for leisure use, I do use it to interact with people from class as well and discuss things related to academics like due dates for assignments and requirements. I do not lie to myself about because I know I should change my habits for lots of my usage of technology but at the end of the day as long as you find that well balance between personal use and academic use, I believe you will just be fine.

I would not call myself the most organized person but there are a few tools I like to rely on in my daily life. I use an alarm app called Alarmy. This app helps me more than the typical alarm app as it forces me to do three math questions each morning when it goes off. This helps me to wake up a little more and not have the opportunity to just hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. I have found myself being more awake in the mornings from this simple change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another app I use almost every day is the reminders app. This acts like an agenda or schedule for myself. Since I find myself on my phone quite a bit when I have something coming up in the reminder app it comes up as a notification in my phone and it is hard for me to miss. Rather than looking through an agenda or calendar each day I know I will get a notification if I have something that day.

I have found ever since Tik Tok became a thing I have found myself on it almost everyday just passing the time. With its personalized algorithms it knows everyday what to show you to keep you scrolling. I find this is the only app that I really find myself wasting time on constantly as more often than not productive videos do not appear on my algorithm with the exception of a few. To help me with this I set a 30-minute time limit on it everyday. This allows me to keep track of the time I spent on the app. With this tool I have found I do not endlessly scroll for hours anymore and waste my time.

With being more aware of how much technology is in our daily lives I have tried working on having that balance. To try and make sure I use technology for academic purposes more than personal use I try and get whatever I need to get done academically first. This helps me to use technology for personal use almost in a rewarding fashion once I finish. For example, once I finish this blog, I am going to reward myself with a little Tik Tok scrolling!