2021 Goal: Spending Less Time on Social Media

Coming to terms with how social media ends up stressing me out rather than helping me engage in meaningful connections with others.
Author

Amanda Park

Published

January 3, 2021

I haven’t explicitly talked about this, but in the past, I was addicted to social media. It wasn’t ever limited to one social media site, either. Throughout the 2010s, I had phases where I was addicted to a combination of the following at any one time:

**I’m not gonna lie - I’m still addicted to this one. There’s so much good free content on YouTube that compels me back to using the site again and again.

These are just the most popular sites, but my compulsion also affected lesser-known sites as well. I was never a “Spend my entire day on the sites” person, but it was a long enough period of time that could be spent in much better ways.

I realized this was an increasingly horrifying problem at the start of grad school (around 2017), but over the years I’ve become increasingly horrified at the depths that social media goes to addict users to checking. There were quite a few stopping and starting points along the way - in periods of stress I was compelled back to spending a lot of time on the sites once again.

It was also hard for me to catch when things were going astray, too. Often I would hop around on different social media sites so it didn’t seem like I spent all my time on one spot. Each outlet served the same purpose of distracting myself from something, but offered little to no long-term value to my life.

With 2021 being a fresh start, I’m ready to make changes to clean the slate and start anew.

Taking Out the Trash

To start off 2021 on the right foot, I’ve done the following:

Deleted:

  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Snapchat
  • Lesser-used sites that pose security risks (Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)

Deactivated:

  • Facebook (keeping it around for Messenger for now; maybe I’ll be bold enough someday to delete for good)

There’s something cathartic about getting rid of social media sites that add no additional value into your life. Even though a lot of the sites I deleted I don’t frequent much anymore, deleting them helped me distance myself from the person I was in my early 20s.

My social media usage now focuses strictly on the purpose of the activity. It currently looks like this:

  • Work-required tools (Microsoft Teams and Outlook)
  • Article aggregation (Feedly and Pocket)
  • Book aggregation (Goodreads)
  • Online messaging (Discord and Messenger)
  • Professional presence (LinkedIn, Github (if that even counts))
  • Educational video content (YouTube, LinkedIn Learning)

It’s still not exactly where I want things to be, but overall, it’s a step in the right direction. I’ve kept a couple of old social media sites around (mainly my Twitter account) for now. But I rarely check it, and I’m saving that one more out of nostalgia than anything.

Conclusion

I look forward to a decade with a further decreased presence on social media. I’ll still be around on this blog and some other select places, so I don’t plan on vanishing. But my time is too valuable to be everywhere at once now. If I want to accomplish my life goals I’ve set out for myself, I realize that I can’t waste my time on these sites anymore.