Spending too much time on social media? Do this instead

Time is our most valuable resource

Valuable resources are limited and time is our most valuable resource. We can optimise our day or prioritise some choices over others, but we cannot create more time or replace the time we have wasted on activities which add no value to our life…So why are we so careless with how we use this limited resource?

According to research by Global Web Index, people spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media and messaging platforms. If we assume people get 8 hours of sleep (which is often far too optimistic), that means we spent (on average) about 14% of our waking hours on social networks.

In fact, this number is probably a gross understatement. Research has shown that there is no correlation between self-reported behaviour and the actual time we spend on social media and mobile devices. Browsing for “just 5 minutes” adds up if you do it dozens of times per day. This is especially true for teens whose intermittent use can add up to a staggering 9 hours per day (more than half of their waking hours!).

Your daily choices are essentially a form of investment. Choose wisely

Think of time as a resource you invest to create value for your future self — The Data Nudge

Skills and knowledge take time so the more time you spend on them, the more you improve. What skills could you have improved if you allocated the same amount of time per day as you spend roaming through social media?

Let’s say you spend roughly 3 hours (actual use is typically longer than we admit in surveys):

3 hours per day = 21 hours per week = 1092 hours per year.

To put this into perspective:

• Completing a 300-level course on Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience here in Victoria University of Wellington takes about 150 hours. So instead of chilling on social media during these 1092 hours per year, you can complete 7 university courses!

For the same amount of time you could:

• Read 32,760 pages (based on average reading speed is about 2 min per page or 30 pages per hour or 60 to 90+ books (350–550pages long)
• Exercise and take 728 sports/dancing classes (90 min long)
• Learn a new language (FSI research shows it takes 480 to 720 hours to reach basic fluency depending on language complexity)
• Write 546 000 words (if you are an aspiring writer aiming at an average of 500 words per hour)
• If you don’t “have time” for your dreams and hobbies, make time

Depending on your long-term goals, personal interests and hobbies you can convert these 1092 hours of online idling into a purposeful pursuit.

Social media is great. Until it starts chipping away the time you have for more important activities

Social media has many perks: you do not have to remove it completely from your life.

As someone who recently moved to live in a different country for the 3rd time in the last 12 years, I fully recognize the value of staying connected to friends and family across the world. As a CBNS researcher, I am also fascinated by how social media impacts attention and working memory and how online communication reflects and plays on confirmation bias, facilitates social contagion and deepens the issues inherent to Groupthink.

Social media is also a great tool for curating content and building a feed with highly personalized content. It allows us to pick the brains of experts in the field we work in and to reach out for help, advice and discussion easier than ever before. On the business and analytics side of it all: qualitative and quantitative research on social media conversations helps businesses stay relevant and tune into consumer needs.

However, its many benefits do not change the fact that social media has diminishing marginal utility.

In simple words: it is beneficial and useful only up to a certain point. Beyond this (oversaturation) point, excessive use takes you into a vortex of irrelevant information and toxic behavioural patterns.

One hour of catching up with friends or tapping into useful online information can be great for relaxing or mixing fun and work. Five hours of mindless scrolling through your feed and getting into pointless arguments is simply A WASTE OF TIME.

Remember, this is not a matter of either/or. You don’t have to give up all social media (I know I can’t). But try cutting it by an hour or two. Then try to re-invest this time in purposeful activities which take you closer to your long-term goals. You will see that the thrill of doing things in the real world is worth much more than the temporary online rush.

Small choices add up to a big difference over time. Choose wisely!

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