For the last two weeks I cut out all of the social media I use: twitter, facebook, and reddit, as well as a few other distracting websites. The results have been interesting.
First up, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
Leading up to the cutoff date, I found myself getting more and more mentally ready to just be done with them all, at least for a time.
And so once I started, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Yes, I had muscle memory kicking in and getting me to type them into my address bar, or bring them up on my phone. But they were blocked (thank you Freedom!) and as soon as that happened, I just went and did something else.
So what did I do with my extra free time?
A bunch of different things.
I found I was more focused at work, and got more done. The second week was our company’s hackathon, which is a cool tradition. I worked on a super-secret project that actually turned out quite well, for a hackathon.
I read a lot more. A couple days into it, I knew I needed to find a good book to read. After one failed attempt, I stumbled on the Orphan X series, by Gregg Hurwitz. It’s excellent, and I’m reading through them all too fast, because of my free time.
I spent more time on my side projects: Minecraft and Cue. In Minecraft, I’m building a university district in Navarre, one of my larger builds. In Cue, I’ve managed to track down some tricky bugs and I’m cleaning up the code before I dive into the first pass at a real ticklers feature.
Television: While I did block Netflix, I didn’t block Amazon, and I’ve picked up The Americans again. Fun show.
I don’t think I spent more time with family, but I do feel more present when I’m with them. And there’s plenty of opportunities for that: flag football practice, dance lessons, taking the older kids to school dances, date night with my wife and brother and sister in law.
Finally, during the last couple weeks I picked up meditating again, and found a great app for that: Oak.
Next question: was it life changing?
No. Partly because it wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be, I realized that I don’t have a huge problem with social media. Sure, I like to be up to date on things, and it’s an easy way to waste away the dead time in life. But I don’t need it. And so it’s not a big deal to have it available.
My plan was always to get through a couple weeks and then scale back the restriction. Use Freedom’s scheduling abilities to unlock social media during specific times of the week.
I’m going to follow through with that plan.
It’s healthy to occasionally cut the extraneous things out of your life completely: coffee, sugar, social media, television, etc. Sometimes you’ll find you’re happier without. Other times, you’ll find that healthy moderation is the sweet spot.
Either way, it’s an important step in living a deliberate life.