How to Have 36 Hours in a Day: Part 1 Social Media

How to use social media to boost your productivity

Step 1: Acknowledge

In the era of ever-growing content consumption, the more content is available in your sight — the less focused you are. Today you can experience an undeclared battle of the 21st century: the Battle for your Attention. Brands, new products, technology companies, they all want to get noticed by YOU.

And in this battle, the fewer touchpoints you provide them, the less distracted you are from the forefronts that are actually important.

Frame from Rick and Morty 4x06 Story Train

At some point, I realized that I have trouble finding important messages among the wall of notifications I receive from various sources on my smartphone. Moreover, I started getting notifications about the things I never wanted to know in the first place. Combine it with the buzzing sound, and I can name it the №1 Distraction at the workplace.

Since we bear the smartphone with ourselves all the time, it is the biggest window between us and the brand to connect.

However, social media providers cannot get any attention with our phones off. We usually fall into the hands of social media apps voluntarily. On average, people spend 144 minutes per day on social media. That’s almost 34 days every year.

How did we end up here, and what can we do to reduce this time?

The people behind the media apps user interface and notification algorithms are cognitive psychology experts. Their two main goals are:

1. 🎯Inside the app: Always keep us engaged.
2. 🎯Outside the app: Get us back inside the app.

This is not surprising because the social media monetization model is based on the engagement level of their users. Practically, it means:

More time we spend in the app = More $$$ the app earns

That’s why these reminders (that are always magically enabled by default) are constantly nudging us to check out a new post from a school friend, new adorable cat video, or claim the FREE GIFT that is waiting for us inside the app.

So based on my observations, I decided to add small changes in my daily smartphone interactions to see how it can affect my life quality.

Step 2: Act

I think we can agree that the purposeless browsing of social media is damaging to our productivity. But we usually do not just go there and start browsing, right? It mostly happens when something triggered us first, and then we find ourselves scrolling Facebook for 30 minutes straight.

The first thing we can do to prevent it from happening is to disable social media notifications. Sounds like an obvious thing, right? Yet, many people ignore this powerful feature; it almost seems like they secretly crave to being distracted.

You can do it in 3 ways:

1. Change notification preferences inside the app settings
   Allows you to customize what kind of notifications will be sent
2. Disallow app notifications in system settings
   Notifications from the specific app will be blocked.
3. Turn on Do Not Disturb mode.
   Your phone will remain silent unless someone calls you two times in a row.

The next thing is to dose the social media usage. Dedicate separate time blocks within your day where you are going to check the recent updates from your friends and reply to all the messages. This will prevent you from constantly being distracted in the middle of the work.

After applying these small changes, I noticed that I began to execute long-lasting tasks (~4hours) with more ease due to the higher level of immersion and focus. And in fact, the story you are reading right now is one of the results of it.

Note that I do not recommend deleting social media accounts. On the contrary, keep them or create them if you don’t have any.

Nowadays, social media is your digital business card. People frequently use it to get a general impression of you. Recruiters use it all the time for background checks during the screening process. It can also be a source of useful connections, and sometimes even business leads.

In the end, we can always choose to get the most benefit out of a particular thing and remain distanced from all the negatives.

Social media is not an exception.

Social media is a great tool that we can learn how to use correctly. On one side, there is a chance of being swallowed into the content void and lose focus. On the other, there are benefits of keeping up the existing social connections and developing new ones.

That being said, we should minimize our time spent on browsing social media and use it for beneficial things like keeping a profile with up-to-date info and getting connected with important people in our lives.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next one!