Why I took a Social Media Break and how I did it

Welcome to 2018. I took an unannounced break from social media back in early December 2017. My original thought was that I was spending too much time on social media and I needed to focus more on personal relationships. A big reason I made this decision was due to this video, which I highly recommend. https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk In this video you will see a former Facebook exec talk about how social media is damaging our society in a lot of ways. Yes, there are some good things about it and i'm not suggesting drop them altogether. I'm only writing about why I made my decision to do what I did. Steps I took to initiate my break from social media...

1. Removed all social media apps from my phone. This included Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, Yelp and Twitter. I kept LinkedIn as I consider that more on the professional side.
2. Turned off any and all notifications for social media apps, even emails, on my accounts.
3. Committed to not using the web to access these same apps on my phone.
4. Made a decision that 0 posts would be made to Facebook, Instagram, twitter and yelp but that I reserved the right to post on Nextdoor as it could be something related to safety. I would also reply to direct messages in Facebook if necessary as some folks use that.
5. Made the decision of not deleting my accounts because I do see some value in these services

I do not plan to reinstall the apps on my phone but I will check occasionally on my computer or ipad. One of the great things that has happened as a result of all of this is that my conversations with people are much richer than they used to be. This I believe is primarily because I'm not putting a lot of my life out there as I used to. So, that's it for now. I hope that you enjoy the video and have a sense of what I went through to dial my use back, maybe you too will see the value as I have.