Time management has always been a struggle for me, and tasks like chores, jobs, and major distractions like my phone have not made it easier for me. Yet, the part that causes the most trouble towards me and my time management is my phone.
On average, I can spend up to 5 hours on average within a week on my phone, which is a huge problem since it takes me away from focusing and doing more important tasks like studying and my homework. This affects my grades, which I have been increasingly more worried about as time passes.
My job also takes a majority of my time and in a way makes me want to spend more time on my phone. During a school week, I can work nearly 20 hours or more at my jobs. When I take into account that we spend nearly 7 hours a day in school which equates to 35 hours a week, it means that the time I spend working is more than half the time I spend in school.
When I get off at work, anytime between 10 and midnight, I’m exhausted and I just want to sleep or spend time on my phone, where I eventually fall asleep not realizing or forgetting the schoolwork I had to get done.
I always knew I had a problem with both my phone and time management, but it has definitely been worse this year, since I have become more distracted working and balancing more challenging classes.
I knew something needed to change. Recently, when I was scrolling through my phone, I saw a video where this girl described the pomodoro technique and what it was for and how to implement it. It was a technique used for you to deep-focus on tasks. One pomodoro (tomato) would equal to 25 minutes of focus on work, to hold yourself accountable you would set a timer that would eventually go off after 25 minutes, and then give you a 5 minute break. This would then repeat and after and eventual hour passes of deep-focus work you would then reward yourself by giving yourself an even longer break of 10 minutes after 4 pomodoros
The pomodoro technique did work, but only when I changed it to fit my needs. I started using it since it was the only technique I was somewhat familiar with that could in a way help me focus more on my work and take the breaks to spend time on my phone.
Yet this technique also posed a struggle for me since I found myself taking a break longer than 5 minutes. Looking over it, I would focus on my work for 25 minutes and instead of taking a 5-minute break I would lose focus and eventually take a half hour (if not longer) break on my phone.
The amount of time I would focus on my work wasn’t really working for me, since it made me spend more of my time on other distractions, like my phone, and less time on tasks that really mattered, like my schoolwork.
I realized that instead of focusing 25 minutes on schoolwork and taking 5 minute breaks, I could instead tweak it a little. After splitting the focus and break time in many different ways, I then set my mind on 45 minutes of deep-set focus on my school work and then taking a break for 15 minutes. This way it took one hour exactly of my time so it wouldn’t bother me that the times wouldn’t align.
This then ties back to how I really need to manage my time and ways to decrease my stress and worry. I never realized how much of my time really goes away until I wrote the section. Half of my time if not more goes towards school and work and the rest that’s left goes towards my phone. Starting to build a healthy relationship with both my phone and time management have helped to in many ways. Eventually if I keep this healthy habit up I am bound to have less stress, focus more, and be be able to put more focus on my school work rather than my phone.
