During the construction phase of the Solar Decathlon competition, I have drastically reduced the amount of time I spend on social media, especially Messenger and Instagram; however, if I get a notification (that is, an important message) I would reply within half an hour or so because it all depends who busy I am at the moment. I’ve noticed I started to avoid some of the group friend chats because these make me less efficient and deconcentrated from the work. Even though, I make sure to always stay in the loop to know what is happening out there where my friends and family are. Once I read the assignment, I thought of the idea to actually change the way I use social media applications to make myself focused only on the work. I decided to click ‘Turn off until I turn on back’ on my Messenger and to remove my Instagram app from my screen for one full day, and I turned out to have positive effect on me and my efficiency. I realized everyone in the team is on the group chat, such that even if someone directs a message to me, other active members around me would let me know and I would go check that notification. Needless to say is that the most important conversations I have these days are the team group chat for the competition as well as my family group chat. With amount of work that I had that day, I forgot about Instagram and I was lucky not to be bothered with any notifications from the application.

I must say this experiment was very useful for me to realize the importance of ‘being present in the moment’ and focus on what is happening at that particular moment rather than staying online trying to be present everywhere. It helped me realize nowadays we only aim to stay connected online as well as to find out there are people surrounding us with their physical appearance that we can connect to. In addition to this, not knowing what the other students are doing for fun (mainly through their Instagram stories) while I am working at a construction site has helped me focus more on the work I have been doing rather than thinking ‘I could have gone to those concerts as well.’

Overall, I have decided to implement this type of communication until the end of the semester to help me focus on capstone and course assignments. I am not going to implement it as strict as during the 24-hour experiment but I will still have control over my activity on social media.