No, I do not mean it in the sense of deleting one app and then leaving the others. No, I mean I went and deleted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I did not end there; I went and deleted LinkedIn and Telegram. As though that was not enough, I went and deleted WhatsApp. l know, at this point we realize two things.

1. Deleting WhatsApp is near close to deleting one’s phonebook. It is near some unheard of, because it has become the hub of communication. It has become where messages are sent because text messages are old school, plus when you have friends who live on the other side of the world, it is useful to have WhatsApp. Only that is not true, it is useful to have WhatsApp if the friends you have from across the world do not own an apple product. Which is highly unlikely, because apparently in the western world, not having an apple product is like saying you do not brush your teeth in the morning. Sorry, I could think of no better comparison.

And 2. I had a lot of applications on my phone.

Here is what is wrong with that;

–       Having that many applications on your phone renders one unproductive for at least an hour of your day, where you are trying to catch up with the thoughts of someone on twitter, or the vacation of someone else on Instagram or the family get together of yet another person on Facebook.

The point is, too many applications as a rule of thumb means more screen time.

–       Monitoring screen time is a new philosophy to many. In truth it is not a philosophy, it is just another smart way, your phone is smart enough to have you know how much time you spend on your phone. If you are reading this and thinking… what? I can do that. Well, yes ma’am and yes sir. Your phone has an inbuilt phone monitoring system that allows you to be able to tell how much time you spend on your phone, how many times you picked up your phone that day and how many notifications you received on a particular day and even sometimes week.

–       Applications increase laziness. The truth is, I did not read this up on some fact-based website from a college student in Oxford who spent his thesis doing questionnaires on what percentage of students feel that having many applications on their phones made them lazy. Quite the contrary, I did the unthinkable and applied it in my own life to determine… is my level of productivity decreased by the number of applications on my phone. The answer is a square yes.

Think about it, how many times do you get home from a busy day at work or school, or whichever you do with your day and plop down on the couch and start to go through your phone. You get to the important messages first, reply to mom, sister and whoever else you deem a priority. You then go to Instagram, go through a dozen pictures at a time and fill your brain with images of what your colleague had for lunch. You further go to twitter to catch up with world news, fake news and opinions of people you have never met in your life. When that has been done, you end off with Facebook. To be honest, Facebook’s popularity has since decreased unless you find yourself over the age of 40, to which we are not judging you. Well, we are… but we cannot exactly expect you to be putting filters on your head with Snapchat.

And right there is the problem, or not. The number of applications available to us are fast increasing at a pace that can only be attributed to the tech era. The more applications we can use, the more removed we become and the more time we spend staring at phone screens and computer monitors.

This is not about the detriments of social media or the advantages thereof, but rather about your time. Plain simply, your time. How it is spent and how much of it is lost unconsciously as you scroll and continue to scroll through yet another application.

Would you be able to delete all social media off your phone, simply to monitor how dependent you are on that little screen? No? Your business connections are on WhatsApp? No? Your business model is on Instagram? No? You advertise on Facebook.

Alright, how about limiting your application usage to a computer, whether portable or not and see the difference. This is not about trying to transform you and send you back to the stone age, but rather about honest self-evaluation and healthy introspection to ask yourself…

How dependent am I on applications?

How much time do I spend on social media?

How much productive time do I lose as a result?

The rest is up to you.



With Love,

Mavis


Mavis is a Brand Ambassador for @KapiaOptics

Find Mavis on Twitter – @mavisbraga or email me – eliasmavis@gmail.com

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