Cell phones and social media is all the craze for teenagers today. It may be a habit to open your phone and check your notifications as soon as you wake up in the morning, or anytime you are doing a task that requires you to wait a little bit. It may be something so little like waiting for your food to heat up in the microwave. Sometimes you may not even realize that you are opening your phone for such a short amount of time for a mostly useless reason. Sometimes it is not a short amount of time though; two hours of endless scrolling can pass by and feel like nothing. This begs the question, how can this habit of opening your phone during every little chance you have affect your productivity in school?
Before you had a phone and had access to social media, you may have gotten all your homework done just in one portion. You may have felt more focused and confident in your work, and overall you may have been more productive in life. But having access to social media has greatly affected some teens’ abilities in school work and every day life. There are so many social media platforms out there such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram that are so addicting to scroll on because you always know what is going on and what is new with others.
Nowadays, a lot of people tend to take longer breaks while doing their homework. The main cause is because of the easy access to their phone. Having a phone in arm’s reach makes it so much easier to endlessly scroll. Because some teens take these long breaks on their phones, they are not getting their homework done on time and they are not putting in the effort that they could be. Some may just rush through it so they can go back to endlessly scroll on their phone. Not putting in a full effort on homework may have consequences, like having bad grades. As a result, one has to work even harder to get that bad grade up, creating an endless cycle of procrastination.
A few ways to be more productive is to leave your phone in completely different room than the one that you are doing work in, so that you have no way of reaching it. This limits your distractions. Another way to boost productivity would to be setting up screen time for social media apps. Make sure that the apps require a password so you do not just immediately go on them when you open your phone. Set goals for yourself so you can accomplish the most and do your best.
