Does Pretending To Be On Camera Make Us More Productive?

Vlogs. You’ve probably seen one of these videos pop up on your YouTube recommendations, or you might even be an avid watcher like I am. Ranging from travel to daily vlogs, they are videos that document activities in a person’s day-to-day life and are usually posted on the internet. Every time I watch a vlog, I always think of how exciting and productive their lives are. But lately, I’ve been thinking about this. How do some vloggers manage to get enough good footage from recording that viewers would like to watch. Every. Single. Time. If their lives weren’t interesting, no one would click on their videos anymore. I’m not saying that they’re putting on an illusion, but what if the burden of this makes them purposely do more in their lives?

A little experiment that I’ve been doing over the past few weeks is recording myself on time-lapse as I study, pretending that I would need the footage later for a vlog. As I did this, there was a slight pressure for me to study for a longer period of time so that I would have enough to show in my so-called vlog. And since people on the internet would hypothetically see this, it completely restrained myself from picking up my phone, surfing the web on my laptop, and engaging in other usual distractions, just so that the footage would be “perfect”. This pretty much boosted my productivity by two-fold, as I am usually very distracted when studying. This was really interesting to me, as nothing changed from my usual set-up aside from a camera.

There’s a little debate that’s been going around in my head about this subject. One side says, “Maybe we should all live like vloggers (without the camera, though) so we could do more things that we want to, instead of just lying around. If we do it long enough, we might just turn out better!”. The other side says, “But being productive 24/7 isn’t healthy either, we should live our own original lives that we ourselves choose to lead and not feel the pressure of public scrutiny.” Up until now, I still haven’t come to a conclusion on which side I stand on.

Which side do you agree on? Are there any points in this article that you would like to add on to or discuss? Feel free to leave your comments in the space below!