9 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.: My alarm goes off at 9 a.m. on my phone, which I leave across my bedroom overnight so that I have to physically get out of bed to turn it off. This way I’m less likely to press snooze or scroll social media first thing. I check my notifications center to see if there’s anything urgent, but there isn’t so I don’t open any notifications.
The only media I use at this point in the day is to message my long-distance partner on Discord. Because we can only interact virtually – aside from the 3 times we’ve seen each other so far in 2022 – it can be hard for me to limit my media intake as much as I’d like to. After this, I get in my car and turn on Spotify for the short drive to get some coffee before heading back home to do some homework, and then start my internship at 1pm.
10:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.: I sit down at my desk to start my homework. I check Canvas, watch the lesson videos & read the linked articles, and check my school email. I open Discord on my laptop (to avoid using my phone) around 12 p.m. because my partner, who’s a few hours behind my time zone, is waking up and responding.
I tend to do a pretty good job not checking my phone while I’m working because I turn on do-not-disturb, as well as set my phone behind my laptop so that I can’t see it. A simple yet highly effective trick I’ve been using for years!
12:50 p.m. – 7 p.m.: It’s at this point in the day where I clock in for my internship. I check Slack and my work email before logging into Intercom – the platform that my internship uses to provide academic support to students taking their tech bootcamp-style courses. There are 3 different tracks: Data Analytics, Web Development, and Digital Marketing.
For all 3 tracks I will check the student’s assignment requirements & lesson materials in Canvas. If the answer to their question can’t be found there, then I’ll turn to Google to find articles and documentation that I can send to the student as a way for them to learn what to do. Some examples of topics I might do a Google Search for include:
- Data Analytics: SUMIFS Excel function documentation, Tableau articles & documentation, module lesson videos & linked articles
- Web Development: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and JavaScript documentation – primarily from MDN and W3Schools
- Digital Marketing: Google Keyword Planner, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, plenty of Google Searches on the curriculum – KPI examples, empathy map examples, etc
Occasionally I’ll have a virtual meeting on Zoom or Google Meets. These could be team meetings, professional development meetings, or tutoring sessions with students.
7 p.m.: I clock out of my internship, grab dinner, then come back to my desk to work on some more homework using the module learning materials on Canvas, my school email, and Spotify. I checked Instagram for a bit, but I’m not really that active on there so I only spent about 15 minutes before starting my homework again.
8:30 p.m.: I hop on a Discord video call with my partner, we talk for a few, and then we play Stardew Valley until about 9:45. The evenings are when I tend to spend time with my long-distance partner either playing a video game, video chatting, using Discord’s feature where you can listen to Spotify together, or watching something on a streaming service like Netflix or Crunchyroll.
Discord is typically the last media platform I use for the night because it’s the main way I communicate with my partner since there are so many features that we don’t get through regular texts.
Media Diary Reflection
I’ve discovered that my media usage is largely related to academics – even my media usage for work since I’m a tutor at an education tech startup that offers tech-bootcamp style courses. I don’t use Twitter or Tik Tok. I only really use Instagram and Pinterest, although I don’t consider Pinterest to be social media and consider it instead to be a visual search engine.
The official documentation for Excel functions from Microsoft, for HTML/CSS/JavaScript from MDN, and for HTML/CSS/JavaScript from W3Schools are probably the most credible media sources that I use because they give the most up-to-date information on syntax and usage for these technologies.