In January, I started on a journey called 19 for 19, where I set 19 different goals that I wanted to work toward throughout the year. One of those is a social media fast in the month of July, and with that starting tomorrow, I wanted to share with you all a bit of my why for doing this.
When I wrote 19 for 19, all I outlined about this goal was that I was going to be taking a month off from social media. I’ve considered doing this for several years now, but I always justified not doing it because I was in charge of different social media accounts for businesses and organizations. I’m choosing not to use that as an excuse anymore but to get to the real reason why I am doing this, I want to share about my journey with social media over the years.
Let me set the scene for you. It’s 14 years ago, I’m in 6th grade, I just turned 12 years old, and my parents FINALLY allowed me to create my very first hotmail e-mail account. I remember sitting around our old desktop computer with several of my friends, Nate, Zach, & Tyler, as we debated back and forth on what my new e-mail handle should be. Back then, you were locking in not only your hotmail account, but also your MSN Messenger username. After much debate, we settled on dvguy_14@hotmail.com, and so began my dive into the world of social media. Everyday after school, you could catch me on the computer, logging into MSN messenger and hoping my other friends had already logged on for the afternoon.
Then came Facebook. With expertise that can only be described as equal to that of a FBI agent, I created my first Facebook account on March 5, 2008, without my parents knowledge. For five months, I hid my Facebook activities from them until one fatal day (August 18, 2008, to be exact) when they discovered that I had created a Facebook account and my ruse was up. At that point, my mom made me change my profile picture from a “cool” photo of me to a “lame” photo of my name that I created on Microsoft Paint so that my face wouldn’t be out on the web for others to see and find me.
my very first Facebook profile photo- the definition of cool
my second Facebook profile photo- courtesy of my Mom
I laugh at that story a lot now because our society has come such a long way in our acceptance of what is shared on social media since those days 11 years ago. Through the years, though, I’ve created several other social media accounts to connect with people in different ways- Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Every one of them serving their own, semi-unique purposes and every single one of them increasingly occupying more and more of my time on any given day.
As the years progressed, I continued to use social media to connect with friends but also added in using it to run business/organization’s professional accounts. While that dynamic still exists today, I have reached a place where I want to spend less time on social media for social connections as well as less time just “browsing” social media just to pass the time.
If you know me well enough, you know that I’m a numbers guy so let’s take a look at some data courtesy of my phone’s screen time tracking.
In the last 7 days, I have spent an average of 5 hours and 30 minutes PER DAY on my phone for a weekly total of 38 hours and 38 minutes. Now that’s including everything from social media and playing games to texting, Face Time, and phone calls- so let’s drill that down to look just at the social media data.
In those 7 days, a total of 20 hours and 20 minute was spent on social networking apps:
Facebook: 10 hours and 26 minutes (avg. 1 hour 29 min a day)
Instagram: 4 hours and 45 minutes (avg. 40 min a day)
Snapchat: 3 hours and 55 minutes (avg. 33 min a day)
Twitter: 1 hour and 18 minutes (avg. 11 min a day)
A few months ago, I set time limits for these four apps specifically with the hope of cutting down my time on them each day but those limits have not been effective in keeping me from clicking the “ignore for 15 minutes” button; a practice I do throughout the day when I hit the limits. The screen time app goes even farther in its analytics of my usage and shares that I, on average, pick up my phone a total of 113 times per day and receive about 156 notifications every day- that’s even with having push notifications for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter turned off. I also feel I should acknowledge that all of this data isn’t including the time that I spend on Facebook or Twitter on my laptop too.
I share all of this because I think there’s value in being vulnerable with everyone on how much time I actually spend on social media- it really is quite excessive.
That is why I am doing this. That is why I am taking a break from social media in July.
I am taking a break from social media because I want my life back. Instead of being social on my phone I want to be social in person. I want to take back those 20 hours a week spent on social media and redirect that energy elsewhere.
When I look at the goals that I set back in January, several of them require a good amount of time committed to them, but when I spend so much time a week wasted away on social media, it sometimes feels impossible to reach those goals.
This next month, I’m excited to read more, to focus more on creating/developing Mankato Drinks, to put more energy into other Web Design/SEO work, and to be more intentional with connecting with my friends right here in Mankato. In August, be on the look out for an update on how all of this went for me.
I’ll see you on the other side.