Something I’ve thought of doing before, but never really got around to, is having a break from social media. Jason Kottke spent a week “fasting” from social media:
Last week (approx. May 7-14), I stopped using social media for an entire week. I logged out of all the sites and deleted the apps from my phone. I didn’t so much as peek at Instagram, which is, with Twitter and old-school Flickr, probably my favorite online service of all time. I used Twitter as minimally as I could, for work only.1 I didn’t check in anywhere on Swarm. No Facebook. As much as I could, I didn’t use my phone. I left it at home when I went to the grocery store. I didn’t play any games on it. I left it across the room when I went to bed and when I worked.
The idea of this is very interesting to me, and his findings also made me think about doing something similar myself.
The whole outcome that I got from this piece, was that it’s more about not using a phone, than using social media specifically.
This is one of my favourite parts:
After the week was up, I greedily checked in on Instagram and Facebook to see what I had missed. Nothing much, of course. Since then, I’ve been checking them a bit less. When I am on, I’ve been faving and commenting more in an attempt to be a little more active in connecting. I unfollowed some accounts I realized I didn’t care that much about and followed others I’ve been curious to check out. Swarm I check a lot less, about once a day — there was a lot of FOMO going on when I saw friends checked in at cool places in NYC or on vacations in Europe. And I’m only checking in when I go someplace novel, just to keep a log of where I’ve been…that’s always fun to look back on.
This is something that I regularly experience, albeit very short lived. It normally happens after a holiday abroad, where the use of a phone is diminished. Usually by either the international usage costs, or just because the people that I’d be contacting, were there with me physically.
I’ve started to evaluate my computer usage in general recently, and I think of it as a refining process. Hopefully with things like automation, and better focus on specific tasks will make it easier.