Time to Waste
How often have you started homework just to be distracted by something else? With entertainment being so easy to find, it can be hard to keep it in its place, especially after being in school for hours. Interestingly, certain companies like YouTube and TikTok have services that are designed to make it easier to procrastinate. Do you think you choose to watch videos? Think again.
When asked what websites or services they visited to procrastinate on their homework, one sophomore said, “YouTube, then TikTok.” This begs the question, why these services? Well, to answer that you would consider how these services calculate relevant content to show to their viewers. Instead of using views, in March 2012, YouTube used watch time to gauge which videos to recommend to viewers, among other things. This was what Jillian D'Onfro, a writer for “Business Insider”, considered “The ‘terrifying’ moment in 2012 when YouTube changed its entire philosophy.” The shift was profitable to YouTube because “by May [2021] the average watch time had swelled to four minutes, from just one minute the year before.” What this means for the viewers is that YouTube is pumping out engaging videos that make you watch, not click. This is bad news for anything else you want to do. Homework, or even petting your dog, is much less rewarding, at least psychologically, than watching YouTube videos.
IT’S IN THE NAME
TikTok takes this to the extreme. Instead of merely calculating based on watch time, TikTok.com comments that while “the system recommends content by ranking videos based on a combination of factors, a strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight.” Notice how watching a video all the way through makes TikTok more likely to recommend more videos like it. This can spell disaster since each upload can be very short and the watch time can add up quickly.
WHAT CAN YOU DO
In order to break free from the addictive cycle of using these services, the next time you open TikTok or watch YouTube, think of how long you spend on each video and gauge your enjoyment of the app without resisting. This is crucial. By not resisting, a psychological process takes over and you are more aware of the quality of the videos. The next time you try to procrastinate, catch yourself and remember that the videos you watched last time were uninteresting, or if they were interesting, note how they were time-consuming. Bringing attention to these thoughts is called mindfulness, and Nick Wignall, a professional psychologist, writes that “if there was only one strategy I could recommend to help people stop procrastinating no matter what the particulars of their situation, it would be mindfulness.” In this way, mindfulness may be your most powerful tool to beat procrastination for good.