I recently read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport*, which is about social media and how to change your attitude to it. I’ve read similar things before, but for some reason this one really got to me and made me determined to make some changes.
I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Facebook I’ve used since 2007 when I signed up to keep in touch with a group of people I’d been at a conference with. I signed up to LinkedIn at the end of 2008 to keep in touch with colleagues, as most of us were being made redundant following a company takeover. I joined Twitter in 2010 as an experiment to promote a charity challenge I was taking part in. I don’t recall when I joined Instagram but it was before it was cool, and all I used to do was share photos with experimental filters!
My usage of each has varied over time, and I have mostly moved away from Twitter and Instagram now because they just felt too high maintenance for me.
I’ve stuck with Facebook to keep in touch with friends, and LinkedIn to keep in touch with former colleagues and clients. And last year I joined a freelance community that’s on the Circle platform. But even with just those three platforms, I’ve increasingly felt that I was wasting time on social media. It’s so easy to post an update and then spend the rest of the day checking whether anyone commented on it, and all the time getting sucked into reading other things and scrolling mindlessly.
I’ve also found that my attachment to social media increases when I’ve published a new blog post that I want people to read. And it takes a little bit of time and effort to schedule posts – creating a graphic, composing some text, and then scheduling the post on appropriate days.
I decided to limit my use of social media
So when I decided to write some content for a book, I decided it was time to limit my social media use. I wanted to make sure my head wasn’t filled with other people’s thoughts and that I wasn’t being distracted by new shiny courses or challenges or sound bites.
I did really well over Christmas. I didn’t check LinkedIn or Circle at all, and I limited my Facebook checking to every couple of days for a short period. I found that I read more books – I got through all of the fiction books on my Kindle that I’d bought and not got around to reading! And I made progress on my writing.
And then I had a need to get back to promoting my freelance services and to tell people about my new ebook. And with the thought at the back of my mind that I was also writing some new blog posts so would need to share those soon. I posted a couple of updates. Suddenly I was doing more posting and checking, and then scrolling. And it felt really icky. There’s a specific feeling I get when I’ve shared a post and keep checking in on it, and I don’t like it.
As I write more blog posts in my current creative mood, I’m worried about getting back into the checking habit again. I want people to read my blog posts, but I don’t want to worry about who’s engaging with the accompanying social media posts, and I don’t want to pop onto social media to check and then end up scrolling mindlessly!
So how am I going to change my habits to try and stop myself checking and scrolling?
1. Have a strategy for each platform. Why am I using it? Who do I want to connect with?
2. Decide how many times a week I need to visit each platform to fulfil that need.
3. Experiment with accessing social media at specific times to see which times mean I’m less likely to spend time scrolling.
4. Continue to use scheduling tools.
5. Arrange more face to face meet-ups or video calls with people to keep in touch and to stop me feeling like social media is the best place to find connection.
To be honest, I’m not sure how easy this will be to do, but I’ve already made a couple of changes as a result of this thinking.
Have you cut down on your social media usage? What have you tried?
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay