Aside from getting married, I think one of the best decisions I’ve made has been a more recent change. Growing up, I was not allowed access to social media. Of course, I kind of felt left out seeing my other friends with social media pages. Then, I became an adult and got my own phone – so I signed up for nearly all of them – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest (although I still don’t really get the social media part of it), Reddit (again, not sure about the social media category), Snapchat, and yes, even TikTok. TikTok did not last very long, it was fun for a while, but then I kept getting too many videos that annoyed me, so I deleted that after a couple of months. I mostly tried using Twitter for my blog promotion, but that lasted shorter than TikTok did.

I have created and deleted about three different Facebook accounts. Come January, as I began looking at things I could do for New Year’s Resolutions, I saw my screen time on my phone and I was surprised at how much of my time I was wasting. The majority was Facebook. I thought that was funny, as most of the time I was irritated, especially by all of the AI and political posts. I knew I had to do something about this. Now, Facebook is how I have gotten my violin students, and how I am able to drive more people to my blog (luckily this is automatically done when my posts are published…feel free to give me a follow if you aren’t already!), so I can’t really delete it. And one of my violin students’ parents wants to only communicate via Facebook Messenger, so deleting my professional (if you’d like to call them that) accounts isn’t really a viable option at this point. But, it’s also not a great way to spend all of my time, either, especially when I can do so many more things in the time I’ve spent wasted staring at my phone screen. I found out a way to limit my time (which does come with a downfall, as it will let me extend my time by either one minute, fifteen minutes, or all day). At the beginning of the year, I removed Facebook from my home screen and set my daily time limit for Facebook to two minutes – just enough time that I can log in and make a quick post or see if my violin student had to contact me. I’ve noticed that the last few weeks I’ve not hit that “ignore” button nearly as much, and there are many days I don’t open it at all.

I still use Snapchat, mainly to message my sister and a couple of friends, but I don’t use the social media part of it. I still don’t see Pinterest as social media, but I rarely log in (again, I keep it for my blog, but I’m not good at even updating it there). I still use Reddit, but I use it for drama and forum questions (like how to stop pleather from peeling, something I looked up just this week).

My full time job involves a lot of downtime, and I mean some days I do 45 minutes of hands-on work, but I still have to sit there for the remaining 7 hours. It’s very easy to waste my time on my phone, because I get so bored at work. Now, I’ve tried filling that time with more productive tasks, like bringing a book (although weirdly I get more looks when I read a book than when I sit on my phone), working on grad school papers, or working on one of my part time teaching jobs. I even brought a crossword search book that I’m slowly working my way through.

I’ve got to say, I don’t miss spending my time on Facebook. It was always such a time suck and afterwards I would aways be wound up by some idiot on some other person’s post (and believe me, there are a lot of idiots on Facebook). But my life is a lot better without it. Sometimes I miss my flip phone, one day I may go back to that when my smartphone needs to be replaced, but we’ll see when the time comes. One of the best decisions I’ve made is getting off of social media (for the most part). I would encourage you guys to do the same, even if its only for one night a week. Trust me, your mental health, focus, and attention span will start to return, and you’ll find more meaningful connections with people (because if you were really using it to connect with people, you can call or text…just liking a post of someone’s trip is not connection).

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Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions below or you can contact me here! I love hearing from you!