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...
- 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.
- Turned off any and all notifications for social media apps, even emails, on my accounts.
- Committed to not using the web to access these same apps on my phone.
- 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.
- Made the decision of not deleting my accounts because I do see some value in these services