I am guilty of wasting 2-3 hours daily on social media platforms and at times even more. That stuff is addictive. In this post I want to share my thoughts on the use of social media, how it changed for me (I drastically reduced its usage), and conclude with some key considerations.

Social media platforms I use or used

• Facebook
  • There were periods in the second half of the 2010s when I enjoyed Facebook and opened the app every day. During COVID times my time on the app started to feel like a total waste of time. When the war in Ukraine started Facebook made me dependent on learning about the latest events inside Ukraine from people directly but oftentimes it was generating depressing thoughts. Other than that, too much of what people post is of little interest to me or is just nonsense, so…
  • I quit using Facebook. I do not have the app and almost never open it from the web, except for rare cases when I would use the marketplace or need to log-in to some other service with Facebook.
• Twitter
  • I was a heavy twitter user. Here is a blog post from 2010 with a picture of my back with the words “follow me on twitter” painted over it. I think I found twitter to be fairly useful professionally in the 2010s as I could follow professionals I cared about and I was learning from them. These days twitter still appears to be the fastest way to get major news from around the world and a place to quickly share and validate ideas, but..
  • I quit using Twitter. Lately the things I see on twitter are pure garbage. Too many pictures, memes and other nonsense. Potentially if I make an attempt to re-teach the algorithm to adjust my recommendations to some specific professional niche and follow a few key people I can make use of it again. 
• Instagram
  • So I’m kind of a recent user of Instagram. I had personal account created in 2018 in order to connect with some new people I met, later I figured that it is not really adding any value and after the war in Ukraine started I no longer feel like I want to post anything that is happening in my personal life, so I took my account private, cut the list of people I follow just to few dozens and created small list of ‘close friends’ to occasionally share some stories.
  • Another use of Instagram is for my climbing account. Someone even called me a “climbing influencer” (LOL, and that with my 1K followers). I find this account to be helping me make new climbing connections I would otherwise not have made, so…
  • I limit my use of Instagram to 5-10 minutes a day except for 1-2 days a week when I need to post my climbing story/reel, in which case I might spend 30 min in the app on that day. I’m happy I reduced my usage of the app.
• LinkedIn
  • Undoubtedly the most useful social network on this list. I have the most connections in this network. I almost never actively posted on the platform, but I gladly extended the network by adding people I interacted with professionally or anyone who requested connection and appeared to work in tech.
  • I limit my use of LinkedIn on my phone mainly because of the latest changes that make it more like Instagram or Facebook with short videos and silly posts, but..
  • I am considering a more active use of LinkedIn since it is the cleanest social network and people generally maintain a professional attitude. The way to use it more actively would be to actively mute/remove connections who post low value posts and occasionally share my own original thoughts on the platform, like this very post. I haven’t decided if this is a good decision yet.
• Strava
  • There is a chance you haven’t heard about this one. It is a social network for athletes. I synchronize my sport activities collected by my Garmin watch to Strava. I only have a few dozen friends there and consider this network to be mostly harmless as it is very focused. Also giving people “kudos” for their workouts or runs is definitely a more respectful thing than giving a like on other platforms for resharing existing silly cat memes or someone’s pretty butt. Nothing wrong with cats or pretty butts but just not the thing I want to spend my online time on.
  • I don’t limit my use of Strava but there is no need to do so given how little time it takes.
• Blind
  • Another less known one. Anonymous professional platform. This one can be useful and I personally asked two questions in the past and got really good useful answers back. At the same time this is an extremely toxic place. 
  • I ban myself from Blind. Yeah, I would install the app when I need to ask something specific and after a week or two remove this toxic depression inducing thing. My TC is never good enough.
• Other platforms
  • Just wanted to mention I use all kinds of messaging platforms for staying connected with people. As for other platforms that make it easy to consume socially generated content I try to be conscious if it is any useful. At times there is quality content, like Kurzgesagt or other quality creators on youtube, or very specific reddit threads.

To summarize: I’ve significantly reduced my time on social media, keeping only those platforms that offer clear value. The rest either distract me or negatively impact my well-being, so I’ve cut them out. Reevaluating one’s own usage of these platforms is a useful exercise to understand where the time goes and what can be done to regain control. 

Key Considerations:

• Strategic Use: You could benefit from social media if you use it intentionally for specific purposes, like sharing blog posts, learning from others, and expanding your professional network.
• Content Creation vs. Consumption: If you’re primarily creating content (e.g. in my case blog posts or climbing videos) instead of passively consuming it, you’re more likely to see returns from social media.
• Time Management: You could limit your social media time to avoid it becoming a distraction. Below are some ideas for reducing the time usage.

How to reduce time?

• Goals. I consciously worked on reducing my social media time by setting annual goals (e.g. “Near 0 time on passive social (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YTShorts, etc)”, “News check max once a day”) and had a few periods of successes and failures, but I learned that cycles of attempts eventually merge to create complete consistency.
• Uninstall apps. Just making it hard to log-in to certain networks drastically reduces frequency of its usage.
• Use a time-limiting software. I’m using Android’s Digital Wellbeing to set those 5m/Instagram, 15m/LinkedIn and other daily limits. This can be done for websites opened on the phone as well.