Monthly Experiment Recap: January
The 2019 Monthly Experiments started off with a bang. Knowing that this month tends to be my busiest at work, I front-loaded the project with something I hoped would increase my overall productivity and improve my ability to focus. Here is what I learned from a January spent without social media and the news:
Quality over quantity applies to your thoughts.
Reducing input from social media and news reduces the quantity of items that occupy space in your head. By pruning the raw number of thoughts that popped up, I found that I had more mental horsepower available to focus and think deeply about things that mattered. It felt like de-cluttering (or tidying for the Marie Kondo fans) my mind.
And because I’m a weirdo who has recorded his arrival time and departure time at work everyday for the last 10 years, I can tell you that I got just as much, if not more done this January versus last January in 17 fewer minutes per day, on average.
Cutting out social media and news makes it much easier to reduce mindless consumption.
By spotlighting conspicuous consumption (e.g. Instagram posts featuring your friends’ friends’ new furniture), social media perpetuates and strengthens the mindset of keeping up with the Joneses. It’s also rife with targeted ads that use your data in more and more ingenious ways to increase the chances that you will make an impulse buy. News sites follow suit and tailor their advertisements to your browsing history and online purchases.
If you think your spending decisions are impervious to this marketing wizardry, you’re sorely mistaken. A social media and news diet won’t completely eliminate these temptations but it will give you back more direct control over how you decide to spend your dough.
There are three important questions to ask yourself about your relationship with social media and the news:
#1. What drives my urge to use them?
For me, and I would guess most people I know, muscle memory is a large part of the story. We’re used to checking Twitter or Facebook multiple times per day and so it feels like a completely natural part of our routine.
But it’s worth taking a step back to consider what cues lead to the physical action of tapping the app on your phone or going to a bookmarked website.
I found that my “why” boiled down to either my dislike of feeling bored/addiction to novel input or a sense of obligation I feel to be informed. Clearly, there are better ways to cure my boredom (including maybe becoming more comfortable with being bored). And when I dug into where the sense of obligation was coming from, I found that I was putting it on myself – probably a relic of my childhood where I felt like the best way to get positive attention from others was to know random/interesting shit.
Your answers will be different than mine and you should think about what they are.
#2. What value do I derive from using these services?
The answer to this question will give you more insight to question #1 above. I was surprised to see what ended up on the page after I spent a ½ hour doing a brain-dump of every conceivable thing I gain from my Facebook and Twitter habit. If you’re like me, you will take a step back and realize that a lot of what you put down is actually just marketing fluff that has seeped into your pores over the years.
#3. How do I define a “good” interaction with social media or the news?
It’s impossible to determine whether you should increase, decrease, or eliminate the time you spend interacting with these things unless you develop a framework for deciding whether an individual interaction is good or bad.
Like most things in life, there are positive and negative aspects of consuming social media or the news. It’s important to take stock of whether the positives outweigh the negatives and then change your behavior accordingly.
To prove that I’m not a total naysayer, here are my criteria for a worthwhile interaction with these applications:
It leads to finding insightful or valuable content that is worth sharing with others.
It encourages meaningful time spent in thought.
It changes my behavior for the better or inspires me to take action.
It builds social community.
It broadens my horizon or exposes me to input from sources outside of my bubble.
It makes me laugh my ass off.
Any time spent on these platforms that doesn’t do one of those things for me is at best neutral and, more likely, a negative.
Reviewing your interactions with social media and the news through a framework like this allows you to determine whether they are ultimately a net positive in your life. If they are, you should consider keeping them around. I say “consider” because there is always an opportunity cost to every action you take. If you spend time and energy on something that is barely worthwhile at the expense of doing something more valuable, you should drop it.
And if you find that any of them are net negatives when the dust settles, you need to eliminate them.
Returning to something after an extended break will change how it feels, possibly permanently.
One of the most surprising changes in my relationship with social media and the news is that after a one-month hiatus, I find that I’m pleasantly detached when interacting with them. News stories that I would have clicked on in a heartbeat in the past and would have immediately affected my mood now have to work much harder to get a rise out of me.
I assumed that after taking a month-long break, I would crave an extended binge but surprisingly, the opposite is true. Most of the content seems a little less interesting, which I think is OK considering how much of it doesn’t meet my definition of being truly valued-added. Except for surprise wedding proposal or surprise solider homecoming videos on YouTube. I will watch those until my dying breath.
So now that January is behind me, what are my plans related to social media and news in the future? Well if you ended up on this post by following a link on my Facebook page, you probably pieced it together that I’m not going cold turkey.
Instead, I’m taking a few small steps to decrease the amount of space they occupy in my life. I’m leaving the apps off my phone and I cut down my website shortcuts from ~20 to three. I still look at Facebook at least once/day but by introducing just enough friction to make it take a little more effort, I expect my time spent there will decrease by at least 50%. I plan to seriously prune who I follow on Twitter and put an App Limit on it using a new feature in iOS 12.
My next monthly experiment promises to be much harder to swallow (nailed it) as I throw off my lifelong mantle of picky-eaterdom and try every food I’ve never had (within reason).