Have you ever considered tracking your personal data? Nowadays, a lot of our data is tracked without us needing to do anything. My Apple watch will tell me my step count and heart rate trends on a given day. My Spotify will tell me how much time I spend listening to my favorite artists and podcasts each year. Nicholas Felton, as described in this article from Wired, took this to a new level by obsessively recording his personal data for ten years and creating yearly reports. I decided to track some personal data of my own, to improve productivity. This past week, I gave up all non-work related social media between the hours of 9 and 5. 

The Challenge

I am a part-time Social Media Manager and a part-time student. My current schedule is work from 9-12:45 and then I dedicate 1-5 for schoolwork. This keeps me on the 9-5 working schedule even while in school. With two big responsibilities, the time I spend working is valuable, but, I find myself often distracted by social media. Partly because social media is addicting, and partly because I use it for work and sometimes get stuck scrolling when I open it for work-related purposes. I challenged myself to give up all non-work related social media during the hours of 9-5, excluding the 15-minute break I allow myself from 12:45-1. This is ideally how I’d want to be moving forward and this experiment was a great way to practice. I also wanted to see how much I was distracted by anything that’s not social media. I’m pretty sure that social media is my main distraction, but I wanted to see if that were true or if there are other things I should keep in mind.

The Results

I tracked each distraction in my notes app, as seen in the photo above. I did better than I thought, however, I think knowing that I was doing this experiment made me want to check social media less. I definitely noticed how much more focused I was on the tasks at hand during this experiment. One other distraction besides social media was a story on the TV show, First Take, that caught my eye. I sometimes put on a show to have background noise but this can certainly be a distraction and it’s a habit I should keep to a minimum, especially when working on something that requires deep focus. The second non-social media distraction was my boyfriend, who also works from home and has an office next door to mine in the apartment we share. Throughout the day we’ll stop into each other’s offices which can seem like a nice way to break up the day, but it can easily turn into a distraction. We’re working on keeping our conversations to a minimum throughout the workday for both of our benefits. 

When I did scroll on social media at the end of the day, I noticed how much more enjoyable it was. I felt proud that I stuck to not using it all day and there was a lot to catch up on. In the past when I was scrolling all day there were times when I felt like I was constantly refreshing hoping to get new exciting content but it never came fast enough. When you’re not scrolling all day, you have so much more to look through and enjoy, and it’s a great reward after being productive.