Something I found interesting after keeping a log of my social media usage for a couple days this past week is that whether it was the weekday or the weekend, my media usage seemed to remain consistent. The frequency of on both school days and days without school appeared to be pretty much the same, despite the fact that my activities for each day where not.

After realizing this, I am now very intrigued by my media usage habits because I think that perhaps my focus in my classes is not the only thing being affected negatively, but so is my studying outside of class (whether it is a weekday or the weekend). The weekday I chose to document my media usage, or last Thursday, I had one class, Microeconomics. Even though I only had this one class the whole day, I had problems focusing the whole hour and 15 minutes of it. To compare, whenever I worked on school throughout both the rest of the day and also Saturday, I continued to have problems with focus due to an overuse of media.

Since my Microeconomics class is easy to make up, and additionally my professor posts all her lecture notes after class without fail, these were probably contributing factors to a higher probability that I gravitated towards my phone and specifically to the many types of social media (Facebook, Social Media, Snapchat) in class. It was very easy to lose focus during the lecture because sometimes her voice is monotone, and therefore I ended up using my phone at a much more frequent rate than I maybe I need to be.

Similarly, the same thing seemed to happen when I was trying to study for the remainder of Thursday and for Saturday as well. No matter what time I decided to try to study, I still was distracted or checking my phone for a good portion of the time or at about the same consistent frequency generally as when I was actually in class. Overall, perhaps this is a sign that I need to work to minimize the presence of media usage in my life in order to focus more, be able to work, and to actually remember that the reason I’m at UGA at the end of the day is to get a degree.