Pay attention to phone use

Having an iPhone for almost 10 months now, I feel like I can't even distinguish when I'm using my phone and when it's away. With so many young adults, students and teachers using iPhone during the day, there is barely a delineation on when we're using our phones and when we're not. When they are in use, are we texting? Using applications? Searching information online? Responding to email? Or...actually making a phone call?

With journalism classes, meetings and assistantship work filling up business hours, responding to texts, calls and emails is like autopilot Monday through Friday; I don't even take note of the pace I'm moving. Living on the same floor as five of my closest friends at Mizzou, I find myself making a lot less phone calls to those friends than I have the past three years of college, since we can talk in our apartments. So I felt like I was using my phone less for actual usage purposes and more for data and email, and wanted to check this perception.

Out of curiosity, since I don't have a phone bill mailed, I called my Sprint account information code yesterday hear a account summary of my monthly phone usage. Surprisingly enough- this perception was pretty inaccurate. It's probably a rare case compared to other college students, but here's what I learned:

• Between Sprint to Sprint, anytime and night/weekend minutes, I've used 1300 cell phone minutes in the past 20 days. I know I like catching up with people on the phone, but this averages to 65 minutes/day. Looks like I'm going to need to assess how much I'm on the phone and when that time is - because apparently those hours are adding up! 

• I used 430 text messages in the past three weeks, averaging about 20 text messages a day. Not bad, or alarming, especially compared to the volume of people I'm in touch with for work on campus.

The takeaway here: Don't live so automatically when making calls, sending texts and using data. Then, I might start to realize what I'm doing for an hour per day on the phone. Is it while I'm walking back and forth from class, or is it taking away time from homework? Am I calling recruiters for the Career Fair, or family and friends from home? When other college students and I start to pay attention to these things, maybe we'll be more productive or assert more thought into what we're doing.