Blog #8: Data Analysis of Usage

Rather than writing out boring paragraphs about my usage and what I found over the past 3 months or so, I put each monthly usage and phone pickup into a chart to visualize. I encourage you throughout this blog to think about your usage and what holds you down as far as technology. Is it TikTok? Or maybe Youtube? Whatever it may be, I hope to offer you advice within this context on how you can make the changes I have made to my life. You never know is someone else’s experience could help you until you’ve tried it.

Now given there is a lot of data to cover but it is vital to understand the changes that I have gone through within the 3 month period.

September:

To start with September, it was really rough, meaning I was on my phone constantly and looking at the data makes it even worse.

This is the number of times a phone was pick up in the month of September

This is the total hour usage represented by a slice of the pie on the pie chart

As far as September goes, this was clearly when I was trying to figure out how to crack down on my usage, which was extremely difficult. I often forgot the task at hand and would constantly reach for my phone to get out of a conversation or for boredom. September was a difficult month with it being the second month of school and school work was being handed out like candy so there was a lot of stress and boredom. The end of September was when I realized that I needed to cut down on my addiction of my smartphone.

October:

October was a long month full of fun football games and the fall coming about which meant more exams and even more school work. At the beginning of the month, I had cut down my usage but after a week or two I began to forget that I need to stop being so addicted to my phone. The things that I spent most of my time on are TikTok and snapchat. I would go to sleep on these apps, wake up and view them and spend way too much time on them. I began to dread who I was becoming because I was constantly on my phone.

This is the number of times the phone was picked up in the month of October.

I had significantly more phone pickups in the month of October than in September. I also noted that in the month of October that I continuously picked up my phone even without a notification or vibration.

Hours of usage within the month of October

The end of October I cut down my usage to have used less than half of my normal usage. I went from using my phone 6 hours a day to 3 and sometimes I was able to get it down to 1 hour a day. Continuing into November, there is a definite decrease in my usage.

November:

Exams were happening a lot which was stressful so I was looking up information on my phone as well as participating in the Marching band I was on my phone to look at the music. These two things were the main thing that took up a lot of my phone usage.

This is the total number of phone pickups for the month of November.

Throughout November I was able to figure out a way with how to control my phone usage. I actually picked up exercising as a way to get off of my phone. It got me off my phone for about 2 hours which cut my usage down to 2 hours. So I originally was at about 6 hours. I also cut down the number of times I picked up my phone. I found things to occupy my time. November was also Thanksgiving season and I just so happened to go to Alaska so I didn’t want to be on my phone and miss the moment of the beauty of nature.

Total hours of usage in the month of November.

December:

Although I don’t have a total monthly usage for the month of December, I still have some data that shows how much I actually cut down on my phone hourly usage as well as how many times that I picked up my phone.

Total number of phone pickups in the month of December.

I was currently still in Alaska until December 5th actually and continued to keep my phone usage down. I did lots of amazing things while in Alaska and decided that I didn’t need to take pictures and wanted to be in the moment. I would usually leave my phone at the hotel while I went out for the day and I no longer felt attached to my phone. I wasn’t worried about what I would miss on my phone because I was worried about what I would miss in the moment.

This is for the “month” of December although it is only five days of hourly usage.

After struggling on this journey to cut down my phone addiction, I have come to many realizations. The first one is that I was clearly way to addicted to my phone. It was almost like a drug for me and weighed me down negatively and it definitely affected my mental health and social wellbeing. I was very antisocial, didn’t want to go out with anyone, would rather pick up food then cook because of convenience, be on my phone rather than do homework and this greatly affected my academics and my social skills. I can now say with honesty and knowledge that I know how dependent I was with technology. September and October were hard to discipline myself but it slowly became easier and now I feel like I don’t need my phone at all. It’s honestly a great feeling to not have to worry about my phone. If there is an emergency I will find out but otherwise, I would much rather enjoy life in the moment, talk to real people face-to-face and be able to say I went somewhere rather then saying I saw pictures of it. I can exercise, go for a walk, go swimming, just be outdoors, paint a picture, travel the world, do homework, and many more things then be on my phone. Now, I will still continue to use my smartphone for information, the occasional entertainment and messaging but now, I can put it down and have no strings attached. This whole project has opened my eyes to endless possibilities to what I can actually do with my time. My advice to you is….. live life in the moment, not stuck in the artificial world that we know to well.