Intentionality and social media

Social media is everywhere. Since it exploded into the culture in the early 2000s it's become hard to avoid, and grown into an advertising industry worth over $330 billion a year.

DataReportal put the average internet user at around 18 hours and 36 minutes a week on social media — more than two and a half hours a day.

If you're anything like me, the list of things to do never quite fits in the day. So it's worth knowing how much of that day goes on social media, and how much of that you'd actually miss.

Using it intentionally buys some of that time back: check only the accounts you actually care about, or fix an amount of time for it and stop there.

Personally, I've got time limits set on my Apple devices to limit me to 15 minutes each day on X (Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. I've also got an ad blocker installed on my iPhone which stops me from accessing those sites, forcing me to choose to go on my laptop or iPad if I want to access them. Beyond that, the few groups that I use Facebook for I've added bookmarks for so that I can skip getting distracted by status updates etc.

I still lose the odd evening to it. But most days it's a choice now, which it wasn't before.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash