The Benefits of Being Disconnected

As promised, I am writing about my experiences during the No Social Networks experiment, which I conducted for 7 days.

Let me tell you about the challenges first, so later we can dive into all the positive effects that the experiment has created for me.

Countless times I’ve experienced the urge to log in and check the updates: new photos of my friends, interesting posts from public pages and groups that I follow, etc. To be completely honest, I’ve also spent quite a bit of time thinking whether my friends have messaged me or not, how many messages I received, and from whom.

I would experience the urge to log in to one of my social networks whenever I was bored, or wanted a temporary distraction from the current task I had to work on. At these moments, the other productive tasks and activities I’ve planned for myself, like reading or learning French, would seem boring to death, impossible to start, and just overall unpleasant. The good thing is that I made a commitment to stick to this challenge, and logging into my Twitter or Facebook account was out of the equation. So unless I wanted to sit around and do absolutely nothing (e.g. stare at people on the bus on my way to work), I was left with only one option – to start on the productive activity, no matter how hard it seemed at the moment to do so. After 1 or 2 minutes, the discomfort wore off, and I just kept going. The most difficult part was to start.

The benefits of the week without social networks were:

1. I’ve been able to better track how I spend my time, being more attentive and observant, overall. It might be just because of the nature of the experiment – the goal was to see where my time goes, and learn how to manage it better, so I put effort into increasing my awareness of the activity I was focused on at any given moment. However, I think the improvement was partly due to the fact that scrolling the news feeds was not my default mode of time spending this week, and thus the ratio of conscious/unconscious decisions of how to spend my free time was better than usual.

2. Every minute I had on the way to and back from work, plus the free time during lunch, I used to learn French with Duolingo app on my phone. The result of that was that I’ve made more progress in French during this week than over the course of the last 4 months.

3. Turns out I have so much free time after work! This week I’ve used it much better than usual – watched a movie with my girlfriend, had friends over, spent time reading a book, helped clean the house, decluttered my laptop, etc. Whereas on the days when I am on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or VK: I come home, open up my laptop, blink, and it’s time to go to sleep again.

Okay, you say. It’s all nice and good, but what is the point of doing this (or other) experiment for 7 days and then going back to the usual way of living? I agree with you. There is absolutely no point. I believe in order for a change to be meaningful in anyone’s life it has to be sustainable. Also, lessons learnt must be put to practice, or they become lessons wasted. That’s why I’ve created a few rules for myself to define limits for the use of social networks.

1. I will limit the use of Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, VK, plus any of the next-generation social networking platforms I will become a part of) to 1 hour on Sundays, from 10pm till 11pm.

2. The only exception to the rule will be when I post content on this blog and need to publish it simultaneously on many platforms to reach as many people as possible. I will login, publish it and quickly log off, without neither checking any updates nor responding to anyone.

3. If there will be cases when I absolutely have to go to one of the social platforms to get an important piece of information, I will only log in if first I find a way to eliminate the need to rely on the network for information in the future. For example: If I need a file from a person, I will login, get the file, give them my email information and instruct the person to only use email to contact me from now on.

My Next Challenge?

I will do a week without sweets! It may seem easy for some of you, but I’ve been a sweet tooth for all my life! The thought of not having a little piece of chocolate or a cookie after a meal makes me depressed. So we will see how the next challenge will go! More on that soon.

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