This week, I wanted to track my conscious and unconscious urges to use Instagram and TikTok. I deleted both apps from my phone on Monday morning. To track my behavior every time that I tried to locate the app or felt my thumb hovering over the app’s old location I recorded it in the Notes app on my phone. Outside of Snapchat, those are the two applications that I use most, so I knew I was going to have strong urges throughout the week. 

Self-reporting data is certainly challenging and comes with a lot of bias. One element that helped me a lot in regard to recording my data for TikTok is that the app is located on the last page of my home screen surrounded by apps that I rarely use. This made it so that every time I went to access the app it became immediately apparent that I tried to do so, and I would record it. For Instagram, however, it was much more challenging because that app is normally located on the home screen that I use the most. This made it so that it wasn’t always in the front of my mind to record the data. Due to this, the number of times I tried to access Instagram according to the data I reported was much lower than TikTok. 

I tried to go on the TikTok app sixty times this week and the Instagram app thirty-three times. Going into the week I predicted that throughout the week I would learn through repetition that the apps are no longer on my phone, and I slowly stop trying to access them. Generally, numbers did slowly fall throughout the week, but there remained a consistency to try and access them.

What I noticed is that when I tried to access the apps most were commonly tied to a time of day. At night before I fall asleep, when I wake up in the morning, at lunchtime, and when I get off work are the times when I want to access the deleted apps most. A common thread between those times is that they are all what I’d call ‘transitional’ periods throughout the day. At those times, there isn’t necessarily a specific task at hand to be completed and time can be taken to decompress or prepare for what’s next. Considering there is no obligation or requirement to be using those apps, to be reaching for them almost always during transitional periods is definitely damaging. Certainly, I could be doing things that are more productive, but I could also be using the short periods of downtime to self-reflect, think about the future, or whatever I want for that matter. Instead, choose to spend it mindlessly scrolling through my feeds. In “Stolen Focus”, Hari sums up the philosophy of a man he meets in Russia as “You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought.” (p. 266). What this means is that you cannot follow your dreams and long-term goals if you do not reflect and spend time thinking freely. Additionally, he discerns that you won’t be able to know what those dreams and goals are if you don’t allow yourself to self-reflect and think freely. I agree with this philosophy and I believe that by choosing to spend the majority of my transitional time scrolling I am damaging my future.