I have significantly reduced my time on my smartphone. Previously, I used to spend a lot of time on the phone consuming information and entertainment. Though I don’t consume entertaining content often, I would have spent a few hours. Today, I got to know why people are loving byte-sized content like Tik-Tok or Instagram reels because they deliver a lot of content within a few minutes. But, at the same time, you are losing something else. The attention span.
I have seen many people who watch reels for hours, even people who are so-called “working professionals”. People must understand how such things will impact them in the long run.
At present, I am reading a book called “Attention Factory” ( The story of Tik-Tok and China’s Bytedance) by Matthew Brennan. It’s a book which explains the how and what of the company and how it got built. The app is currently banned in India. There are several reasons for it to be banned in India. I have never personally used the app, I have seen its presence on Instagram.
For the past two weeks, I am working as a full-stack developer in a company. I have learned many things like the nuts and bolts of a startup. I usually sit right near the founder. Got to know how things operate. Though not at full scale, I have started understanding how startups work.
Building and scaling a product is never easy. It always requires people to get involved in it. And the market must accept the product.
Not only my phone usage went down, but my internet usage too. I am spending very little time on my personal laptop. But, screen time hasn’t been reduced because I look at computers in the office with a much better internet speed. Most of the time, I use the internet only to search the technical stuff. And nearly I spend 7 to 8 hours in the company understanding and building software products.