Thinking Critically About How We Use Our Devices
Some of the most insightful lessons I have learned in college have been ideas and activities that put the concept of time into perspective. For example, on a j-term course my junior year, my professors converted the circumference of the island we were staying on into a timeline of the geological history of earth. We journeyed through the Precambrian area all the way up to the Holocene we live in today. Out of the roughly 40-mile trip around the island, if I remember correctly, the time that humans have existed on the planet only came out to around a foot. Whatever the actual measurement, it failed in comparison to the distance we had already covered. The time of an individual human life might not even add up to a millimeter at the same scale. Despite this, we seem to have a very difficult time understanding the brevity and subsequent value of our time on this planet. I think Tim Urban, the main author of the blog Wait but Why, does a great job describing this idea. In his article, Your Life in Weeks, he very effectively puts the timeline of human life into perspective. While relying heavily on Urban’s ideas and writing style, here is my attempt to put our time in college into perspective.
This is the life of a 90-year-old human in weeks
Ninety rows and fifty-two columns. When you put it on paper it doesn’t look very long, and certainly not very spectacular.
Out of the ninety years total, here is the time you spend in college.
The first thing that sticks out to me is how little time we actually spend in college relative to the rest of our life. I did the math for you and found that we spend 193 weeks of our life enrolled in undergraduate education. If you live to be 90 years old, that accounts for only 4% of your life! Maybe that isn’t immediately concerning, but when you think about how important those 193 weeks are in your development, you might change your mind. In college, we need to learn how to balance our own schedules, network, build lasting friendships, get a quality education and develop numerous other intangible skills to propel us into a successful adulthood. If we only have 193 weeks to do that, I think we should take that time pretty seriously.
Maybe four years still seems like plenty of time to accomplish what you need to. However, 193 weeks is slightly misleading. The above image doesn’t take into consideration the fixed commitments you will have throughout undergrad. Let’s try to figure out how many weeks you actually have to work with.
First, I’m going to assume that you are going to sleep a couple of times while you are in college. Young adults should be getting 7–9 hours of sleep per night, let’s assume you average the minimum of 7 hours per night throughout your entire college career. That means you will be spending 56 weeks or 30% of your time in college snoozing! Suddenly, you’re down to 137 weeks of college and it looks like this:
The reason we are ultimately all here is to get a degree, right? At St. Thomas, the bare-minimum amount of credits to graduate is 132. If you take 16 credits a semester for 8 semesters, you come to 128 credits, just 4 credits shy of your diploma. 16 credits work out to 4 classes a semester. Each 4-credit course is at minimum 3 hours of lecture time per week and each semester is roughly 3.5 months or 14 weeks long. Multiply 4 classes, each 3 hours a week for 14 weeks and you end up spending 168 hours a semester in lecture. Multiply that by 8 semesters plus another 4-credit course over J-Term and you end up spending 1,386 hours or 8.25 weeks of your allotted college time actually in class. You should also assume that you will be spending at least as much time out of lecture as you do in lecture for doing homework, writing papers, studying, etc. Your time doing actual school work is now at 16.5 weeks. Remember that this is just the bare minimum amount of time! If you add a minor or your course requires a lab, your total time will increase. Your non-committed time is now 120.5 weeks and looks like this:
This still doesn’t take all of your time commitments into account. You still need to factor in time to eat, get dressed, and transportation. If you are a fitness enthusiast, you would need to take your fitness routine into account. You might also have a job that you need to account for in your time commitments. However, let’s very (key word: very) conservatively estimate you need 2 additional hours per day to get all of these tasks accomplished. That adds up to 16 weeks. Take that from your uncommitted time total and you are left with 104.5 weeks of uncommitted time to pursue your own interests in college. Here is what that looks like:
Again, I want to stress that this is pretty much the most amount of uncommitted free time you can expect in college. I will also argue that doing the bare minimum to graduate is not going to be conducive to your success in the future. However, for the sake of universal applicability, let’s just assume you have 104.5 weeks to work with to squeeze the most fun, experiences, and learning into your four years at St. Thomas. It really isn’t a lot! We need to seriously consider how we use this precious time!
Ok, this is great, but what does it have to do with thinking critically about how we use our devices? Well, my hope is that it helps you think about the long-term implications of how we use our finite time.
A study done on campus showed that students used their phones, on average 3.5 hours per day. In four years of college that works out to 28.1 weeks, about 27% of our non-committed time. Here is what that looks like when superimposed on the non-committed time image:
I think this is immediately depressing and it’s only our phones! It doesn’t take into account the amount of time we spend on our laptops and other devices! What could we do with 28 extra weeks of college?
However, I will also admit this image could be slightly misleading. I would argue that our phones can be pretty useful as tools for navigating our daily life. Our phones might actually be great resources to leveraging the limited amount of time we have before graduation. And surely we use our laptops and other devices to get some of our work done. Bottom line, we aren’t luddites regressing back to the stone age, that would be foolish. Without some context then, the 3.5-hour figure isn’t perfect.
If you’ve walked through the halls of the ARC, you might have seen a poster with this image on it:
It’s a pie chart (duh) showing how students use their phones. This means it actually gives insight into whether the way students are using their phones are productive uses of their time. This is where we can start to make critical decisions about how we use our devices.
What does your pie chart look like?
In healthcare economics, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are used to measure the value of a treatment, procedure, or medical device. It is a way to measure the cost of the treatment relative to the benefit to the patient. We need to do the same for our devices. In other words, we need to figure out how much benefit our devices give us versus how much harm they cause. Let’s call it quality-adjusted college weeks (QACWs).
Not all phone functions are created equal. Consider social media. As you can see, most students spend the majority of their time using social networking apps. If you count Snapchat as social media (I think it is reasonable to), social media makes up 32% of the amount of time students spend on their phone per day. What benefit does social media provide? Does it help you stay in contact with your friends and family? Does it keep you updated on news stories and events? How much value does it give you?
Now, what does social media cost you? It definitely costs you time. Over your undergraduate career, social media takes up an average of 8.8 weeks! It might also cost you your mood. Recent studies have shown a relationship between social media and feelings of depression. What is the QACW of social media for you? Could you change how you use it optimize its benefits while minimizing its costs?
You can extrapolate this to other phone functions and your other devices as well. What is their QACWs? How do their QACWs compare to other ways you could be spending your time? The answers are likely different for everyone so you will need to think about it on your own. For myself though, this analysis was enough for me to delete my Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I just couldn’t justify the return on investment of using them anymore. It also led me to optimize my device settings to minimize distractions throughout the day. I started to think about what was important to me and filter out what was not. I hope it does the same for you.
I think college is too short to not make the most of. I hope you agree. What looked like 4% of our life is really closer to 2%. Understanding the finite nature of time is an excellent way to put college into perspective. You can use the principles of this blog to think critically about the way you use your devices, but they should really go beyond that. These ideas can help inform all of the decisions you make in college. It takes some time to reflect on what is important to you, but it will most definitely help you in the long run. Just keep this image in mind:
For more information and tips on how to improve your relationship with technology visit the Tommies Unplugged webpage at stthomas.edu/wellness
Originally published at www.stthomas.edu.