Social media is such a great tool to connect with others, create awareness and keep up with current events. The downside though is that, with an endless stream of information coming in everyday from millions of users, it has become increasingly difficult to set boundaries.
These days it isn’t hard to imagine how much time we spend on social media. Endlessly scrolling through posts and replying to messages all day has become the norm. The memes are everywhere. What may seem like 30 mins every morning could actually be 1 hour and inevitably the quality of your real life suffers. Also, to make matters worse, since social media has become such an integral part of our society and culture it is becoming increasingly impractical to abandon it all together. Therefore, the best solution to this problem is to practice self control, limit our social media use and create a balance between our digital and real lives.
So, how can we can we effectively do this?
To help deal with this problem, here are four stepts to limiting your social media use so you can get your life back.
Step 1: Track your Current Social Media Usage
The first step to limiting social media use is to first track how much time you actually spend on social media. When you can measure and analyze how much time you currently spend you will know how much time you need to reduce it to to be more productive. A lot of the time we’re just scrolling through posts we’ve already seen out of our thumb’s instinctive muscle memory.
For some social media apps like Instagram, it can actually tell you how much time you spend on it daily, set a time limit for usage per day and mute notifications. Also, now while scrolling through posts, Instagram lets you know when you’ve caught up on all new posts which gives you some incentive to stop scrolling.
All these features sound great, but, this is just one of several social media apps. Plus, you still actually have to make the decision to use these features to see any changes. So, until all social media apps have this feature, here’s what we’re gonna do.
To track your social media use you can, on an Apple device, check your screen time usage in Settings. If you don’t have an apple device or screen time is not for you, you can download a time monitoring app or manually log the hours you spend on social media. Some time monitoring apps you can try are :
- Quality Time – (Android)
- App Usage – (Android)
- Moment – (iOS & Android)
- Instant – (Android & iOS)
- RescueTime (Android & Web)
- WhatPulse (windows, macOS and Linux)
- Webtime Tracker (web) – free
It should be noted that third party time monitoring app do require a lot of trust on your part. They must have access to your phone usage and information to provide you with analysis and reports. The more in depth the analysis is the more information they will need to collect from your device. Please be certain that you trust the app you are giving access to your information. When you have decided and selected the time monitoring method of your choice, view your reports. Don’t beat yourself up if the results are less than favourable. The results may startle you but it’s definitely worth doing. You are now one step closer to improving your life and bringing about a positive and more productive change!
Step 2: Set a Limit for your Social Media Time
The next step is to set a limit for the maximum amount of time you want to spend on social media each day. To figure out what an ideal limit is for you, consider how many things you have to get done on a daily basis and how much free time you realistically have available to allocate to social media.
If, after analyzing your daily schedule, you still have way too much free time to devote to social media, simply cut your current usage time in half. Then, set aside time to seriously check yourself and your goals and prioritize! There are way better things to do all day than check social media! Even if you do have the time, think of all the amazing things to see, places to go, people to meet and goals to achieve that you’re missing out on because your eyes are glued to your phone.
Don’t be that one friend that’s on their phone all the time instead of actually being present and enjoying special moments with others. I know we’ve all been that person at some point but we don’t need to keep being that person. We can be so much better! If you need help with figuring out how you can live a more productive life please check out post my on 7 Steps to Designing a Productive Lifestyle.
Step 3: Find Strategies to help you stay within your time limit
After setting your limits for social media use it is important to come up with strategies that will help you actually stick to this limit. It could be as simple as turning off your social media notifications at certain times, putting your phone away at social gatherings or deliberately leaving your phone in the other room. Find a method that works best for you and get your life back!
Step 4 : Stick to the Plan!
Good Luck!
