Staying Off Social Media

Nearly five years ago I experimented with staying off social media for a while - especially Twitter.  It was a bit of an impulsive decision.  I just decided that I'd lay off it for a month.  At the end I concluded that I'd only use it in the evenings from then on.


Looking back I remember very little about the trial, but reading my notes on it I discovered that I was getting a lot more done when I stayed off it.   I don't seem to have kept to my evenings only rule.  There is probably a lesson about my total lack of willpower there.

Recently I decided to stay off social media for quite a different reason.  I wanted to have an unclouded view of the issues in the 2019 UK General Election.  I decided that I wasn't able to see though all the campaign trivia and distortion.  The parties are all out to convince you of their case.  But worse, the media want to turn it into a story with a narrative.  I wanted to make a considered choice on what is really important.

The upshot of this was that to achieve this objective I had to once again stay off social media, and this time as I had to avoid it completely I really have been off it.   It has been a fascinating experience.  Once again I found my productivity going up - I even find time for this long neglected blog.  But this time I was more aware of why.  It wasn't just, as I had previously supposed, that I had more time for other things.  It also changed the way I think.  After a couple of days I found that not only was I forgetting the media bias about politics, I was also thinking about it very differently.   I was no longer seeing it as a day to day thing, but was thinking much more about the future and the kind of country the politicians had in mind for us.  So I'd wanted to clean up the data I was using, but found myself also clarifying my thinking as well.

And this has spilled out into other stuff I do. I've found that I've been switching effort from keeping up with the daily flood of stuff that needs to get done towards doing more stuff that will pay off in the medium and long term.  In particular I've been doing some work on the systems I use to keep track of what I work on so I can switch from job to job more efficiently.   It is paying off surprisingly quickly.

Nothing in life is so simple that there are no downsides to match the upsides.  You can't beat social media as a way of turning a spare five minutes from a boring interlude into a delightful dollop of ditziness.   And nothing spices up a dull television programme like sharing the reactions to it on Twitter.   But the increased time perspective I have achieved with only a short break from social media is certainly not a trivial benefit.   It will be interesting to see if I've already got to baseline or if there is more to come.

Oh and has it changed my mind about my political decision?  Sort of.  I haven't yet decided who to vote for but I've got the list down to 3.  And I am now deciding between choices all of which I like. That's not bad going.