PROCRASTINATION pt. 2: Tik Tok
Tik Tok. If you’re under the age of thirty you know what this app is. Probably if you’re older too. It’s a fun piece of Chinese malware designed to keep your attention for as long as possible. How does it do this? It feeds you videos that are a minute or less, with the ability to skip videos simply by scrolling up. This turns your “just one more video” into sometimes a several hour binge, and by the time you look up and see what time it is you’ve wasted a good chunk of the day.
Why am I talking about Tik Tok? Well, in my ongoing war against procrastination, I’ve identified the app as one of my greatest enemies. See, I undownloaded after it was uncovered that Tik Tok secretly tracked your location, but a couple of weeks ago I added the app back on my phone. What harm could it really do anyway?
As it turns out, A LOT.
See, the real threat of the app for me wasn’t it’s sketchy code, the real threat was the huge time waster it really was. See, when I first got the app my senior year of highschool, I had very little to do, so I had a lot of time to waste. So when I spent hours a day on the app, I didn’t feel like I was procrastinating, or that it really got in the way of my day-to-day life. That didn’t hold up this time around.
Last week I didn’t notice any increased procrastination, I was able to get everything done on time, with no problem at all. However, THIS week was different. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but there were times when I would say to myself “just one more video” knowing very well just how untrue that statement always was.
I’ll be honest, I was developing an addiction to the app. But I didn’t want to admit this to myself, until today. See, I needed to get a lot of work done today. I had already pushed it off to today, when I was supposed to get it all done. I even got up earlier than I usually would, just to make sure I could finish all the miscellaneous tasks I needed to. And big surprise, I wound up spending most of my morning on the app. I can’t overstate just how frustrating it can really be to waste so much of my day, just knowing that I’d be stressing future me out.
As fun as this app might be at times, I MUST delete it off my phone. While it definitely isn’t the only thing I procrastinate with, it’s immediately become one of the worst. I’d also like to encourage anyone reading this who has the app to really think about how much time you spend on it. Is it really worth it? If not, join me in helping make procrastinating a little harder to do.
