How I Suddenly Have More Time on My Hands
And it’s only been 10 days
Today is officially day 11 of my 60-day sabbatical from social media and I am frankly stunned by the abundance of time on my hands. I never really realized how much more I could possibly do if I were to change just one tiny thing about my working days.
I just stopped checking social media
As a social media coach, I maintain (or used to maintain) an active presence on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. I bid Twitter goodbye a couple of months ago, otherwise, that would have been in the mix as well.
And then towards the end of May, I embarked on my experiment: 60 days away from social media while I could discover what it meant to be truly and deeply engaged in meaningful work once again.
To be clear, I am not quitting social media just yet. I’m just testing to see what my days look like without social media, as a business owner.
In the last 10 days I have managed to work more deeply on my blog (creating fresh content and updating old content), read books and long-form articles more intensely and without distraction, spend very little time on my phone, record an episode for my podcast, upload a video to my YouTube channel, organize a whole bunch of documents and digital photographs and actually deep clean parts of my home that have lain neglected for the last year or so.
Let’s not forget my foray into the culinary realm where I’ve experimented with dishes I’ve never tried before. I’ve also officially completed 50 days of daily meditation.
It seems rather incredible that I have this affluence of time now when earlier I would feel stretched to the limit of my daily capacity.
So why don’t more of us do this? We don’t even realize it but social media is the gateway to distraction, if we aren’t being intentional about it or prudent in how we spend our time online.
Three Things that Help me Stay Off Social Media
I’ve tried so many things in the past and while some of these have worked temporarily, none of them kept me away without FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out), until I came across these three things.
The first tool is the Chrome extension ‘Intention’. It is the best tool I have found in the realm of site blockers. While other site blockers rely on your willpower, I find Intention to be refreshingly different.
It actually asks you to pause intentionally before logging into a website. In other words, it reminds me of the three questions I need to ask myself before I log on to a site:
Is this necessary?
Can it wait?
Could you do something else instead?
When I read more about the founder, DK, I realized why this tool worked for me better than the rest. His story is one of pure grit and vulnerability. It’s how the Universe decides to send people your way when you’re ready and receptive.
The second thing that helped me stay off social media was the reminder that my daughter is in high school.
Anyone who’s a parent to a teen knows how tumultuous this time can be. Between adolescence and virtual schooling (no thanks to the current pandemic), tempers have been frayed and time seemed short to do all of things we wanted to do together.
It suddenly hit me that she is in high school. That means, in a few short years, she will be in college and stepping out of home. She won’t be my baby girl anymore. (Well, she’s always going to be my baby girl, of course!)
I was reminded of this especially when I read Tonya Dalton’s Joy of Missing Out: Live More by Doing Less and she laid out how many Mondays I have left with my high-schooler before she leaves for college. Trust me, once you see it that way, you’d be spending way less time on social media too.
Finally, the third thing that helped me take this decision was doing the first run of the Thoughtful Life Calendar from my coach George Kao.
All through May, I worked on my calendar with two other accountability partners who kept me grounded and in place with regard to my core priorities. It came to me that the more I worked on things that made me happy and content, the more I valued the work that I did. It was such a synergistic balance of joy and passion that made work feel both enjoyable and fulfilling.
Kao builds his Thoughtful Life Calendar coaching program on his core foundation of Joyful Productivity and it is the one thing I recommend everyone adopt when it comes to daily peace and contentment.
- I’ve signed up for his 6-month TLC program as well that starts on June 14th, 2021.
The beauty about stepping away from the noise online is that you are able to listen to the incredible sounds of time, space and silence in your life.
It was a silence so deep, so still, that a man could finally hear the beating of his own heart, the gentle whispers of the soul.
-Kamran Pasha
If you enjoyed this, I talk more about how to find joy in content creation & organic growth in my free Friday newsletter for content creators.
Click here to join my community of conscious content creators
