Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 19

I am missing Twitter horribly, but I think I have established a healthy relationship with Facebook.  I can visit it once a day for a few minutes without getting distracted by it.  But then I never liked Facebook much in the first place.

Here's the thing though.  I got up yesterday with an idea for some writing that would make a good blog post.  But I didn't follow through on it because I had other things to do that were higher priority.  But I did get involved in making a comment on a blog.  This was a breach of my no social media regime.  And once I had started I found myself going back to it several times to keep up with the debate.  I nearly made a second comment - but managed to summon the willpower to delete it halfway through.

The thing is, the time I wasted on reading, commenting on and following the debate on that blog post would have been enough to have very nearly half completed the blog post of my own that I abandoned.   Am I the only person who does this?  It is really perverse behaviour.  Cutting out the good to concentrate on the great is a really sound principle. But when I try to put it into practice it often turns out to result in giving up the good to concentrate on the trivial.

I sometimes wonder if there is any hope for me.

http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/giving-up-social-media-for-month-post.html

Giving Up Social Media Day 16

Well so far I have avoided the temptation to get back onto Twitter.  I have checked Facebook a couple of times, but as some people use that as an alternative to e-mail I should have allowed that as part of my ground rules.  I didn't get sucked back in.

I have strayed a little by making some comments on blog posts.  I am regretting those both as spoiling the integrity of this one month experiment, and because I didn't really enjoy them.  The problem is the impulse to respond when you have an idea, coupled with the need for completeness once you have started.  The return on the time invested is not worth it.

Other than that I have found that I have more time for other things and and am doing more of the stuff that I want to be doing.  But I am not getting as much of a pay off as I had hoped for.  Time I used to spend dithering on Twitter and Facebook is now often spent reading up on news stories in more detail than I really need, or other trivial time wasters.  On the whole, I am coming to the conclusion that if I am going to waste time, social media are a better waste of time than some other things.

I will respect the parameters of my experiment and not draw any firm conclusions yet.  But my feeling at the moment is that it would be better to time limit my social media rather than exclude it altogether.  It is more fun than some of the things I do instead, and the real trick is to develop the willpower to stop and get on with something more worthwhile.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 19

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 5

07:30 Not feeling so many twinges, but also finding some non social media distractions to keep me from what I want to do.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 4

7.20 Sunday morning is my peak time for social media usage - combined with catching up with politics via the Sunday papers and Radio 4. One of the effects of my social media fast is that I feel less engaged with current affairs. This is making the morning rather refreshingly different.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 3

6.20 And to my surprise I wake up with no desire to check my Twitter feed. I have other things that are more important to me right now. I wasn't expecting to get into this frame of mind so quickly.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 2

6.15 For years the first thing I have done in the morning is to check my Twitter feed.  It feels a bit like being a Borg unit cut off from the collective this morning. Still I used the time to finish off and publish a blog post on which I have been working for a while, so that was good.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 1

9:40 I am barely an hour into this trial and already I'm feeling twinges.  I need to find some alternative activities to replace my reliance.  I wonder if it would have been better to have come up with more of a plan rather than impulsively starting the trial on the spur of the moment.

Giving Up Social Media for a Month

Are social media good or bad for you? I have been pondering this for a while now.  I really enjoy social media, and Twitter in particular.  I often find myself checking Twitter at more or less any time of the day.  If I think of 'bon mot' my first reaction is to tweet it. I enjoy all the great stuff other people stick up as well.  It is also a great way to keep abreast of the news and other interesting things.  I am not a huge fan of Facebook and rarely spend huge amounts of time on it, but even so I still visit it nearly every day to see what is going on.  I also read comments on articles if the article itself is interesting.  I also make comments - it is obviously important to make my own position clear over quite range of areas.  Needless to say I will check back to see if anyone has commented on my comments.