You get vacations from work every year. Do you get any vacations or rest from your social media account?
Like the majority of people using a smartphone, you may have an addition to social media.
- How often do you consult your phone and social media every day?
- Could you leave your phone away for 10 hours, without checking it?
- Could you repeat the process during an entire week?
We have created a habit of going on social media without ground
As millennials, we’ve been on social media for most of our adult life, and often since the teenage years.
We have developed habits of checking our emails, Facebook, Instagram, from every few hours to every few minutes.
However, the habit got created from the inception of Facebook, and thereafter the creation of the smartphone industry.
The social media industry created a war for attention, and created addictions, so we come back as often as possible and watch the ads they need to display.
The habit has no ground whatsoever.
Checking the activity of our friends and relatives on Facebook had an interest in origin, but only once a day was enough.
The creation of the like button, the development of the ads platform completely changed the course of the platforms and got us to become addicted.
Do you need to check every minute to see what your friend has just done? No!
Let’s go back to a slower pace
Once we understand that we don’t need to be present every minute on social media, we can become conscious about what we are in after?
Do you want to stay in touch with your friends living in another city? Do you want to be aware of events happening in your area?
These meaningful needs do not require constant attention.
If watching jumping cats videos, summaries of Friends or series you do not care about, ads about delicious food, useless gizmo you need to buy, require our immediate attention, then you may have an addiction to social media.
And it is time for a vacation or diet.
How to take a vacation from social media?
When you realize that you lost many hours repeatedly for weeks without reason on social media, it is maybe time to consider lowering the dose or attempting a full-scale vacation.
It is like eating pasta or delicious pastries you’re addicted to. It is not easy at first but makes you feel much better afterward.
First step: understanding why you should do social media diet
The first step is seemingly easy but failing to reckon its importance sets you up for failure on the social media diet.
If you don’t understand the need for leaving social media, then you have no incentive for even trying to take a diet.
It then starts by asking yourself: “what will I miss when I leave social media?”
There’s a big chance that your life won’t radically change from being away from social media for a few hours.
Second step: understanding the social media diet it is not permanent
Even, if you’re an addict, taking a diet for a few hours a day makes it temporary.
If you try a diet, you know that you will always have a moment to get back to it every morning or evening.
After doing a social media diet for a few hours, three things will happen:
- You will realize that you didn’t miss much
- You will know why you get back to your social media account. You’ll have a purpose for checking it: checking your friends’ messages, seeing what they have been up to, etc…
- You will be proud of being away for a while, and will probably feel happy to continue the diet for even longer
Third step: removing the apps from your phone
The core idea to succeed in the social media diet is to make it hard to fail.
Start by removing the social media apps from your phone.
If you have an impulse, the struggle of reinstalling the app and losing a few minutes will make your desire go away.
Fourth step: enjoy your day
By now, you have a phone without distractions.
Now you’re up for a long, focused, uninterrupted where you’ll be spending time on undisturbed meaningful work or meetings with friends and colleagues.
You can appreciate the lower level of stimuli you’re getting. You are like back in the early 2000s. You can send texts but you don’t need to get an immediate response.
Fifth step: appreciating the results
Hopefully, by the end of the day, you’ll feel proud of the achievement, even though you have missed checking your facebook or Instagram account.
It is so true that the influencer trying to get money by showing his or her well-sculpted body holding a revolutionary orange juice was worth missing… It could also be that magnificent cabin in the mountain where you’ll never go…
If you realize that in fact, your life won’t change by ignoring that information, that is very good.
You are now ready for a social media vacation.
The final destination: a full-scale social media vacation
Social media is like food addiction.
For the first few days, it is difficult to not go on the app because it feels strange and bad to hold ourselves. We are addicted.
After one, two or even three weeks, life becomes much clearer.
The mind is sharper. You realize that not being on social media is a relief.
You are less overwhelmed by all this new information which you don’t need.
I know what you will say: I need social media for work
Don’t even try to say that you need to check social media for work.
You are probably trying to be busy rather than delivering work on social media.
The best way to avoid that trap is to plan the day, incorporate the work within a process.
You can use publishing, curating or comment management apps and services.
You will be able to focus on the work without having the noise around. And you’ll be able to stack the tasks and perform them in a limited time slot, without losing your time.
If you’re publishing on social media, and you don’t use a planner, it means you don’t have a consistent and coherent base of media to publish. Your brand will appear scattered and unfocused.