Social Media Cleanse

With so many posts being published on social media every day it is sometimes hard to resist a scroll through. This is something that I have been conscious of the past few weeks and I realised that I would spend up to an hour of my day scrolling through Instagram alone! I have decided to have a couple of weeks away from social media consumption to see how it affects my productivity and mindset. I will still be posting as usual with my updates but I have dedicated apps for this sole purpose of posting not consuming.

I think it is easy to become addicted to social media sites nowadays with them being so easily accessible through our smart phones. I have an iPhone X and I absolutely love it! I do however remember a time before having internet in the home and when social media didn’t exist at all. I’m glad I was a child in the 90’s and grew up playing outside and being creative, making up new games to play.

One of the problems we have is following so many accounts, having too many friends on Facebook and liking an abundance of pages for products and brands. This absolutely clogs up your timeline and news feed. I used to get annoyed by what I was seeing in my timeline but you absolutely have the ability to control this. I used to unfollow specific groups and brands who were posting irrelevant content as well as tailoring how many connections I had on these sites.

My social media brand has developed over the years and this month my blog turned five years old. I decided to post everything publicly back in 2013 when I had launched ‘lifeofglen’. This has now changed and developed to ‘Glen Conbeer’ or @glenconbeer everywhere as my online presence and brand has changed. Many people don’t realise that when they see a post from me on Facebook for example, it is actually a page they are viewing and not a profile. This means I don’t have a ‘news feed’ of other people’s posts for me to view. This has been absolutely amazing with Facebook as I quite dislike the social media platform (especially with the latest scandals and breaches of privacy uncovered) and used to waste a lot of time on it.

This approach to posting content and not consuming it has now carried over to my other accounts and this has fuelled the beginning of my social media cleanse. I have a lot of work that I complete on a daily basis for a number of different companies so the time I have spare is important to me and I want to be more productive with it. I will be monitoring how things go over the coming weeks and will let you know how this cleanse affects my productivity and also my mindset.

Do you find you spend too much time on social media sites or any specific apps? Let me know in the comments – I am really interested in finding out what others think of this.

Have a fantastic day and thanks for reading!