Addicted to Social Media? Gaining control over your Phone Addiction
Is social media evil?
[Prefer video form? You can find the video essay at the end of this post.]
A new currency
Going online today it’s like walking through a busy tourist street. To reach your goal, you have to resist all the offers, avoid random people and keep moving before someone tries to scam you.
My point is that the online world is a saturated place. Everyone is in it and everyone has something important to say.
I think this freedom turned money into a secondary currency. Instead, everyone is looking for one thing: attention.
Like Darwinian evolution, the internet naturally evolved to maximize attention seeking behaviors. And at the top of the attention chain, we have social media networks.
With the help of smartphones, social media apps are part of our daily lives. As of 2017, there are 2.79 billions active social media users with Facebook taking the lead with 2.01 billion monthly active users. [1]
These numbers will just keep increasing and as expected, people are wondering how social media is impacting our lives. The truth is that these technologies enable us to be all connected but it’s also exposing us to a lot of risks.
The ultimate productivity killer
There are numerous studies connection social media use with causes of depression, anxiety and other emotional consequences. Companies like Facebook collect and sell our personal data in such a way that governments are starting to increase the rights we have over our own personal information.
There are a lot of problems with this companies and platforms…
Yet, I want to focus on something a bit more personal, how social media is affecting my ability to be productive.
I grew up online and as expected, I developed some pretty unproductive habits around platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
When I am around technology (like now) is when I am the most vulnerable. I can see my phone in the corner of my eye, silently whispering for my attention.
I guess you can call this procrastinating but I think it’s more like a bad habit or addiction.
The Social Media Loop of Death
As I seat down to work on an important task, like writing or researching a topic, my mind starts wandering off and I check my phone.
Is there any notification?
I go back to work but now I need to check something online.
So I google it…
And 20 minutes later I’m on YouTube watching some random celebrity interview.
I go back to work…
At the end of the day I feel tired, not because I accomplished much but because this back and forth between distraction and work drain my willpower.
The worst part of this cycle is losing control over how I spend my time. This impulse to go online is completely unconscious, which makes is quite difficult to avoid.
#millennialproblems. Problems that need to be fix ASAP.
It sounds like there is not much going in favor of social media right? Emotional issues, time wasters, privacy issues. There’s an increasing number of people criticizing social media and how technology is actively designing our opinions and hacking our attention.
Quitting social media is becoming a statement.
Yet, despite all these negatives, I still think that social media is pretty awesome.
Putting the “Social” back in Social Media
As a content creator, it allows me to share my content with people who enjoy it and need it. My podcast is the perfect example of the benefits of social media.
So far I had 7 guests on the show and all of them I discovered and first connection via social media apps.
Yes, most interactions I have online are superficial and probably artificial but once in a while, real people get to find my content and connect with me. Honestly, it is the best tool to find new creators and learn from them.
These tools are designed to grab our attention and makes us spend as much time as possible using them. And to be honest, I want the same from you.
If you spend a whole day watching and reading all my content, I would be extremely happy. Yet, if you are procrastinating by consuming my content, it’s not my fault.
You are responsible for your time.
Taking responsibility
Giants like Facebook or YouTube have a team of engineers constantly trying to hack your attention, to turn your time into profit but at the end of the day, we are still in control. Like our emotions, we have to take responsibility over our ability to choose how we spend our time.
And this may sound quite ironic but in a blog post published by Facebook entitled Hard Questions: Is spending time on social media bad for us [2], they mentioned the following:
“According to the research, it really comes down to how you use the technology. For example, on social media, you can passively scroll through posts, much like watching TV, or actively interact with friends…. Just like in person, interacting with people you care about can be beneficial, while simply watching others from the sidelines may make you feel worse.”
Looking at the problem of social media purely from a productivity issue, if we all quit social media but instead spend time in from of the TV, what’s the point?
Therefore I think it’s more productive to look at what we can do to gain control over our time, regardless of the technology trying to hack our attention.
Let’s get practical
1. Practice Self-Awareness
You need to become aware of these breaks in concentration. I design a simple sheet to track how often I get the impulse to go online while I work. You can download it here.
Place it next to you while you work and every time you get the urge to go on social media, note it down. This urge will sometimes win over you so as soon as you catch yourself distracted, stop, note it down and return to work.
This exercise will train you to detect these moments of weakness and soon enough you will be able to stop yourself.
2. Turn on Airplane mode.
This works like a second layer of protection and you should enable it both on your computer and phone. If you cannot stop yourself from going on social media, you will be greeted with a polite reminder to go back to work.
If you need to research something online, create a list of search terms and when you return online, research everything in bulk. Because you have a clear reason to go online, you are less likely to get distracted and wander off into the distance.
3. Indulge with care
Remember that once you go online, every major website is optimized to grab your attention by the face.
Avoid the feeds, turn off auto play features (like on YouTube) and remember how precious your attention is for your ability to be successful.
If you want to go deeper into these tactics, I compiled some tools and simple hacks you can implement to create an extra layer of protection. For more information visit the Blog.
Regardless of why and how you got here, I managed to grab your precious attention. Still, I hope this information can empower you to gain control over your attention and consume content in a conscious way.
And remember that technology is only getting better at showing you information based on your past searches, yet if you want to change you have to decide what content you want to consume in the future.
Enjoyed this post? Let me hear those 👏 and let me know your thoughts ⬇️
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