As many other members of the class did, I began this assignment by using RescueTime to track my computer activities over the course of the last few weeks.  Before I launch into my analysis of the statistics that the app collected for me, I’d like to mention a few caveats:

1. RescueTime did not account for my phone usage, which (unfortunately) accounts for a huge amount of my “distracted” time.  However, through this activity, I also discovered that this is where I read the majority of my news (the BBC mobile app, for instance) and listened to news broadcasts or informative podcasts.  Thus, my RescueTime statistics lack some of my most positive and negative uses of technology (though positive and negative are potentially extremely subjective here).
2. The app has no way of tracking time I spent reading or consuming physical media. I go through the majority of my (self-proclaimed) important readings on paper.  I typically have spotify or email up while I engage in physical reading, which (partially) accounts for the massive gmail numbers in the following graphs.
3. Also, I felt a need to cheat when I knew that RescueTime was monitoring my activities.  This meant that I switched some of my Facebook time to my phone, or tried to more actively visit news sites during this period.  You will note, however, that news does not even show up as one of my categories.  This is both disappointing and unsurprising news.  It confirmed my theory that I only read news in small chunks when in transit, when procrastinating, or when engaging in distractions during meetings.
4. Some of the categorization seems arbitrary.  For instance, time spent in Evernote goes under “productivity,” even if I was using Evernote to collect fuzzy animal links (I have not yet done this, but now maybe I will).

Alright, caveats aside, here is what RescueTime revealed:

Perhaps the most important line:

 

For the first few days, I tried to manually log some of my news sources:

2/5/15:

• NYT (15 mins)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• word of mouth

2/6/15

• 99 percent invisible on commute
• NYT before recitation

(end of my attention span when it comes to manually logging this information)

I started using Pocket to avoid having three hundred tabs open at any given moment, but quickly discovered that for me, out of sight pretty much meant out of mind, and I rarely came back to those news articles.

The bottom line here: I spend a gross amount of time on gmail and Facebook, and my computer usage is highly unproductive.  None of this is really a surprise to me. It basically revealed a massive underlying level of media distraction in my life.

I have recently been spending a lot of time thinking about attention, focus, productivity, and cognitive space – mainly because my first semester has passed and now I feel a lot more pressure to accomplish significant things (blah blah blah). Part of this has led me to think more about making space to write, reflect, explore, and think.  One of the themes that keeps coming up in my explorations is the idea of crafting physical space to promote (or prevent) certain actions.  With that in mind, I decided to create a type of “map of my desk space” to further unpack my media consumption.

It ended up looking a lot less a desk and more like a 3D bar chart: the diameter represents the frequency of visits to the site/medium, and the height represents the amount of time I spend per visit/use of the medium, so the volume represents approximate total time spent engaging in the medium.  I collected this information through a combination of RescueTime, estimation, and timers.

Here is the key (unfortunately, the colors did not come out super well):

Laying out my “desk” space forced me to think about how I mentally organize my sources of information.  Ultimately, I realized that I understand and focus on concepts better when I see them on paper, but that for things like news, things that are temporary, I typically need to use digital media.  I attribute this to the rapid turnaround rate – physical versions of these would pile up incredibly rapidly.  Based on this understanding, I separated the categories into “static” (i.e. textbooks, papers, books read for fun, patents, etc.) and “dynamic” (Facebook, Twitter, email, websites/blogs, NYT, BBC, Snapchat News, Messaging).

 (top view)

 (side view)

Gmail (the green blob), was my most frequented site (large diameter), but I used it for relatively short spurts each time (so it is a short bar).  Similarly, the Facebook bar is almost flat as I only ever briefly scan through Facebook, but I do so incredibly frequently.  Conversely, the papers bar is very tall, but has a small diameter- I only sit down to read papers once or twice a day, but when I do, I spend hours on that task.

Looking at this arrangement, I was curious about the sources of my information.  I already know that I receive an alarming amount of my news from messages, word of mouth, or Facebook, but I wanted to further explore my influencers.  I arranged my bars into a venn diagram:

I am, by nature, a highly social and socially influenced individual, so it was not entirely shocking to see how much of my media came from friends and outside sources.  It is interesting to note that the things I spent the most time on originated from a combination of my friends and my own investigations. I found this to be both reassuring and logical – that is the most interactive and dynamic space.

One aspect of my media consumption that was not captured with this framework was that I read much faster when read on paper.  I’m not entirely sure how this factors into my scaling plan, but it certainly impacts how much information I process.  It also does not account for the difference between time periods: I happen to be a morning person, so for me, not all hours are equivalent.  I’m much more efficient in the morning, so it takes me less time to get through content and effectively process it than it would at night. Based on my RescueTime stats, I’m trying to consolidate my email time rather than spreading it throughout the day, but it’s sometimes difficult to find the appropriate space to conduct email sifting.

The final aspect of my media consumption that I did not examine was the location of engagement.  For instance, do I read most of my papers at my desk? Do I read the news on the T? I know I mostly listen to podcasts on the way to work, and I mostly read for fun on my couch, but in the future it may be interesting to explore any correlations between location and type of media.

Overall, I learned that I am easily distracted and potentially very unproductive.  There is a lot of room for stream-lining, and it might be worth reconsidering my (lack of) consumption of traditional news sources.