Adham Galal

Prof. Branson
Writing 2
June 1st 2016
Writing Habits
Introduction:
New technology has always altered our behavior and our daily habits, especially
in the case of mobile phones. These small handheld devices introduced a world of
possibilities to our fingertips; in this case I decided to monitor my cell phone usage to
explore my writing habits. More specifically I monitored the length of text messages sent
at different times of the day and was able to relate fatigue and exhaustion to writing by
tracking how active people are throughout the day. An example of a similar study is one
that was conducted byLatergramme, a company that helps manage social media
accounts. It was found that engagement is at its lowest between 9am and 3pm which
correlates to the time period when people are most productive and do not have time to
just browse social media on their phones. Another study by Pew Research Centers
Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group
(PRCPEJ-TEG) found that there is no significant correlation between the time of day and
the number of users accessing the news from their phones. This report was conducted in
an attempt to further understand the reading habits of the medias audience and how
reading has evolved electronically, allowing them to target their readers at several peak
times during the day by posting their most appealing articles. My data attempts to
emulate these studies, by tracking the length of text messages in an attempt to explore

how users tend to send shorter text messages the more tired they are.
Method:
To do this I used my texts as a sample and simply tracked the length of the
messages sent and categorized them by time. One category encompassed texts sent
between 9am and 3pm and another category included those sent from 3pm to 9pm, this
procedure was followed for 5 consecutive days. These categories were made in an
attempt to compare morning/afternoon texts with evening texts in addition to comparing
texts by day of the week. To clarify, my main area of investigation was identifying my
most productive time of day, the longer the text message the more productive I am,
meaning the length of texts was my unit of measurement. Even though my sample is a bit
small since it only investigated my personal behavior, I expanded the sample size to 20
texts a day and followed that method for 5 days to compensate and make the data more
reliable. After my first 20 texts I would count the number of words in each one and record
it in an excel spreadsheet. Later these numbers were all processed to obtain an average
text size, this allowed me to sum up an entire set of values into a single number. Doing so
allowed me to display the information more clearly in an attempt to visually identify the
pattern that occurs. Since there were numerous ways to display the data, it took a while to
decide on a format but eventually I realized that having a dual bar graph that displays the
morning and afternoon averages side-by-side would provide the most direct comparison
between the categories. Moreover, each dual bar would represent a day, so having them
all in chronological order you could also see how the average text size varies as the week
goes on as well as the variation as the day gets later.

Data:
After putting together all the data, the general consensus was that the later it is in
the day the less productive I am, the same effects occurred the later it was in the week.
This seems to be a logical pattern since people tend to tire out once they are done with
their day jobs. Personally, after class I tend to crash on my bed and drown my sorrows in
a few TV series, during this time I am less likely to be on the phone texting or doing
anything productive for that matter. The following graph displays my data as the average
number of texts at different times.

As seen above, the average number of morning texts starts off at about 15 and decreases
to around 11 by the end of the week, similar findings are observed with the afternoon
texts however it seems to spike up a bit on Friday after following a general decreasing

trend. Another fairly obvious observation is the large difference between the AM and PM
text length, not only are they shorter but they are substantially shorter. The graphs
displayed on the Huffington posts article about Latergrammes findings show similar
trends with engagement.

While at first sight it may seem that these graphs are contradicting, since in this case
engagement increases the later the day gets, this graph tracks engagement meaning
liking and commenting on pictures on Instagram - this is considered more of a spectator
activity and is thought to be a result of users being too tired or unmotivated to create
posts so they merely observe and react to others (Huffington Post). This directly aligns
with the data I collected and the implications it carries about fatigue. On the other hand,
the research carried our by PRCPEJ-TEG conflicts with this by showing that there is no
direct correlation between the time of day and the percentage of users accessing the news.
Discussion:

My results and the trends seen by the corresponding visual show that the later it
gets in the day or the week the shorter the texts I send are. Since fatigue follows the same
general trend it is reasonable to conclude that I write less when I am more tired and that I
am less productive during that time. While this is a study conducted on only a single
person, other studies show the same trend and make similar claims. After studying over
61000 posts the founder of Latergramme, Matt Smith, explained less people are
posting and that more engaged users are using Instagram at that time [5pm],
(Huffington Post). These ideas further develop the suggestion that tired users participate
far less and are less likely to be productive than energetic motivated users. This supports
my findings in the sense that if I am on social media I am not being very productive
therefore I would be the most productive and am most likely to write between 9am and
3pm. Being from Egypt, another reason I personally think I am more productive during
that time period is that the time difference between America and Egypt is around 9 hours
and so the mornings are the brief window where I, as well as my family, are awake,
meaning that I am forced to be productive during those times since it is the only time
when I can effectively communicate with them. However, as mentioned before this is not
a habit that is exclusive to me since several others also find the same time period to be
productive. While PRCPEJ-TEGs research is not in complete agreement with the rest of
the data, it does not directly contradict the data and it has mixed suggestions since it is
hard to classify reading the news as either productive or unproductive. For those reasons
it seems that my hypothesis is still correct; people are less productive the more tired they
are and are far less likely to write during those times. This of course could be further
investigated, a good way to develop our understanding of writing habits would be to

expand the sample size and track all writing instances as opposed to just texts as well as
rate the subjects energy level at the time of writing in order to quantify fatigue and
empirically compare it with the length of texts. Doing these things will give a more
rounded and informative perspective on peoples writing routines and how they are
affected by fatigue and different times of day.

Works Cited
Mitchell, Amy et al. "The Most Popular Times Of Day Vary". Pew Research Center's
Journalism Project. N.p., 2012. Web. 23 May 2016.

"Here's The Best Time To Post A Photo On Instagram". The Huffington Post. N.p., 2015.
Web. 23 May 2016.