Using Time vs. Hardly Using

When thinking about technology, my first instinct is to think of social media and the ways that it influences not only myself but lots of our daily lives. For myself personally, I try to use my time wisely when being on a phone or computer, however, I find that from time to time I am often getting distracted and have a lack of focus. This begins to be an issue when procrastination takes place and certain tasks are being pushed back.

When doing research, I came across the stat that over 210 million people are addicted in some nature to social media. This is an insane number. In the diagram below, these are the average statistics that people aged 16-64 are spending on social media,

Some social media that I tend to use includes Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and the typical text messages. From first glance, it does appear to be a lot but I typically only use Facebook or text messaging for conversation and research purposes. However, Snapchat and Instagram on the other hand are strictly often used for social media interaction which can consume most if not all of my social media screen time. These can be huge distractions in my day-to-day life. With all of this being said, the one app that specifically takes a lot of my other screen time is Google Docs. This app helps keep me focused and school-focused as almost the entirety of my assignments and syllabus/daily plans are recorded on there.

Overall, I would say that I do use most of my time in a purposeful, academic focused way, however, I can be caught being lazy in given moments. I am sure that lots can relate to that in some way but hope that minimal, if any, of us fall under the 210 million that are addicted!