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Infomagical Challenge 5: Magical Life

Today is the last day of the infomagical challenge, and the challenge today is called “infomagical life”. The challenge was to create a sentence to articulate my personal goal to live by. In the podcast, they explained that being present in your everyday life makes your life more enjoyable. They also explain that in the future, you will not remember the times you scrolled through your Instagram feed, but you will remember the moments that actually had an impact in your life. It took me a bit to think about this, and to think about what I wanted my goal to be. I finally came up with, “Be present in the moment”. Often times I find myself stressing about things that happened in the past, or things that could happen in the future and overall, it doesn’t help me to improve. My goal is to only focus on the things that directly affect me or impact me. This means that I will try to spend less time aimlessly scrolling through my social media accounts retaining useless information, and try to use my phone for things that directly affect me. Also, I will try to only use my phone when it is necessary, in order to be more present in my life and not zoned out in my phone. Looking back at the media self-assessment and media use diary, I found that often in my spare time, I would go online just to occupy myself whether it be scrolling through Instagram or mindlessly messaging my friends/ Looking forward, I’m hoping to only retain the information that can be useful to me, and to not use media excessively, only when I need it. #infomagicalchallenges #bepresent #magicallife

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Infomagical Challenge 4: Magical Connection

Today’s challenge is to have a 7-minute conversation about something that you have seen heard or watched today. In today’s podcast, they explain that it takes 7 minutes before a conversation actually begins to become intellectual. In today’s world, it can become difficult or rare to actually have a face to face conversation with someone as technology takes up so much of our time, and often times it is just easier to simply text someone. For this challenge, I had a conversation with my friend Alex about his hockey team. The conversation started because we saw a post that his hockey team posted about one of their players, through their account. At first, we began talking about how he has a hockey practice later today, about his schedule and how many times he plays hockey a week. We then continued to talk about some of the players on his team and about his workouts. Often times during the conversation, there would be moments of silence that we would not have anything to talk about, which would be awkward. After the 7minutes were up, we continued to hang out, and the conversation got easier, and soon the awkward silences weren’t awkward anymore. While tracking me media use in my media use diary, I noted that a lot of time was spent messaging my friends. Were this conversation done through our cellphones, there would be no awkward silences as you could wait to reply once you’ve thought of something to say, and as well, our answers would have been more thought out. This challenge reminded me that sometimes conversations are more meaningful when they are done in person as they are real, and this ultimately brought me closer to my infomagical goal of becoming less dependent on my cellphone. #infomagical #challenges #connected #conversations

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Infomagical Challenge 3: Magical Brain

Today’s challenge is to only focus on the things on my timeline that contribute to my infomagical goal, which is to spend less time on my phone and to be more in tune with my surroundings and with what’s going on in my life. In this challenge, I am to try and avoid memes or popular articles that many people are talking about online, so that I can try to avoid information overload. Throughout the day, I tried to avoid twitter when I could, as that is the place that I usually find articles or memes that are currently trending. I found this challenge particularly hard, as when I was on twitter, it was hard to try and avoid pictures and articles as you usually don’t realize what you’re reading until you are half way through reading the tweet. Throughout the day, because I was only reading things that were of importance to me, I found myself spending less time on social media apps, as I would run out of things to scroll through. Often times, I will go on my phone to look for something and then realize 5 minutes later that all I’m doing in scrolling through social media. I think this challenge helped me to ultimately reach my infomagical goal as it reminded me that I do not have to read what everyone is saying online, and only to focus on the things that are of importance to me, or from people that I know personally. Like I said in my media use diary, that I sometimes feel anxious when I do not have my phone in my hands. At the beginning of the day I did feel this anxiousness as if I was missing things that were happening online, but over the course of the day I began to relax and not care so much about what I was “missing” online, as it probably would have little relevance to me anyways. #infomagicalchallenge #Magicalbrain #noteverythingisimportant 

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Infomagical Challenge 2: Magical Phone

 Today’s challenge is called “Magical Phone”. In the podcast, they talk about “tidying up digitally”, and how it can be different from tidying up in real life, as you cannot actually touch the things online that you will be deleting, for example, your apps. The idea of this challenge is to declutter your cellphone by deleting the things that do not “spark joy” in your life. The idea of this challenge is not to delete everything, but to delete things that are not necessary in your life, or things that do not bring you joy. They say during the podcast, that is it about concentrating on what you want to keep, not what you want to throw away. I often find myself doing this probably about once a year, usually when I run out of storage on my phone and cannot take anymore photos. While going through my phone, I deleted the app bitmoji, which I only used once and forgot delete. I also deleted the Drop Box app, as I store all of my schoolwork through google drive. I also deleted an app that lets me change the music on my laptop from my phone, because I figured that that is just ridiculous. With my remaining apps, I categorized them and placed them into folders. I placed all of my social media apps in one folder, all of my music apps in one, and another for all of my miscellaneous apps. Lastly, I went through all of my photos and deleted any that didn’t bring me joy anymore. Looking at my phone now definitely makes me feel less cluttered, and also relieves some stress. As they said in the podcast, this challenge made my phone now become more task oriented, and less of a place to escape to. I found this useful because during my self-assessment and media diary, I found that I would get easily distracted with my phone. This will help me to use my phone more when I need it, and less when I’m bored. #infomagicalchallenges #magicalphone #declutter

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Infomagical Challenge 1: Magical Day

Hello and welcome to my blog. Throughout this week I will be completing a series of “Infomagical Challenges”, from the podcast titled, Note to Self. My info magical goal of the week will be to spend less time on my phone and be more aware of my surroundings. The main tasks for these infomagical challenges is to “organize our overworked brain, and to think more clearly.” The challenge for day one is called, Magical Day. This podcast begins with different voices expressing how they feel overwhelmed by the constant need to complete tasks simultaneously. “I definitely feel information overload.” Everyone feels the pressure to multitask during the day as there are just often to many things that need to be accomplished. The challenge today was to only single-task. This means that throughout the day I must try to only perform one task at a time in order to try and slow down my brain. Throughout the day, I attempted to only perform one task at a time which proved to be more difficult than I had expected. While making myself breakfast, I found that I had to catch myself going to reach for my phone to check my notifications or scroll through my social media accounts. Also, while watching television I found myself subconsciously going to reach for my phone to check it, while I was actively watching television. And lastly, another notable challenge was when I was trying to complete some schoolwork, I found myself often switching tabs to my Facebook when I was bored, or again, checking my phone and messaging my friends. Overall, I found this challenge to be more difficult than I had expected, and often times I had to remind myself to not reach for my phone or switch tabs. I found that in terms of my schoolwork, I did get more done than I usually would have as I was more focused than normally. Like I had noted in my self-assessment and media use diaries, my biggest distraction is my phone as I can go on and perform mindless tasks for hours on end, and it is even a subconscious action for me to go and reach for it. #infomagical #challenges #addictedtomyphone