Social Media: A Blessing or a Time-Stealing Curse?

Nowadays, social media comes in a package with the internet connection. Whether you want it or not, everyone and everything is on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and many other similar sites. To feel part of your extended group of friends and to be able to tap into the life of the community, one needs to be a well-versed social media user.

We Scroll Endlessly – Social Media Has Stolen Our Time

Populated by cat videos, opinionated rants, and unrequested and extremely detailed life stories, social media is by design a distraction. As such, it can be deeply damaging to your productivity – be it in school, at work, or even within the family.

Reading, watching, liking, commenting, and endlessly scrolling through entire albums of pictures takes valuable time out of your day. Minutes turn into hours and the same hours pass well into the night, taking away much-needed rest. Moreover, as surfing social media causes you to take on an unusually heavy emotional burden, it also exhausts you psychologically. Soon enough, your overall productivity level will plummet and your sense of accomplishment will be lost.

Declutter Your Social Media Life to Enjoy Newfound Calm and Energy

The negative effects of social media are particularly obvious when you finally manage to break away from its grip. An immediate improvement in your relationships with those around you will follow, not to mention a newfound calm and energy. You will discover that the day is longer than you used to know and that the outside world can be an even better source of fun and inspiration than your screen.

Giving up entirely on the benefits of the internet may be too extreme and even damaging to an individual at this point. Total separation and a reclusion into solitude is definitely not the answer. Balance can therefore be achieved once you have managed to successfully declutter your social media life by following a few steps.

Music Makes You Forget the Social Media

As a rule, it is advisable to stay clear of social media platforms during your work schedule. Instead, tuning into a playlist made especially for enhancing productivity can render higher levels of concentration and calm. There are several high-quality online music platforms that cater to that exact need, improving work environments all over the world.

Free Your Mind by Unfollowing the Irrelevant Content

Even during your free time, the need to declutter your social media life remains just as important. One of the first things to do is to familiarize yourself with the “unfollow” button. Go through the Friends and Liked lists, unfollowing sources of content that are no longer relevant to you. If you can identify the cat video or motivational poster people, all the better. Your mental space is far too important to be occupied with irrelevant things.

Unfollowing may seem harsh to do to some people that are essentially well-intended, but the reality is that your own state of mind must come first. Ignorance of other people’s problems, life events, favorite movies, or dinner plates might come as actual bliss.

Categorize to Organize

Even social media platforms themselves have realized the need to better organize the aforementioned lists and many others. As such, they have developed or allowed apps and plugins that can help you put your social media account in order.

Twitter and Facebook, for example, allow the option of creating lists of people according to the type of relationship. Coworkers, close friends, family, or acquaintances are thus separated on the scale of visibility, saving you the hassle of individually unfollowing every person. You should also leave or change the settings for any group that is no longer relevant to you. These can quickly overtake your newsfeed and keep you from seeing anything else.

You Manipulate Your Phone, Not the Other Way Round

Smartphones have made possible internet access without interruption. As a result, every minute that has to be spent waiting consists of scrolling through the same feeds. Turning off your phone notifications can be a great help in controlling yourself when it comes to mobile access to social media. The philosophy behind this is that you alone should dictate when to go online, not an automated alert.

The same smartphones have been the cause of the flooding of social media with pictures. A good way to handle this is to organize your photos into albums as soon as you upload them. This way, you will never lose track of your memories.

Prohibit Useless Content From Filling Your Head by Revoking and Unsubscribing

Thankfully, social media-based games are not as popular as they used to be, sparing a multitude of people from rolling their eyes upon receiving a request from one. Revoking permissions for the apps and games you no longer use gets rid of a lot of useless content that fills your feed. Unsubscribing from newsletters and their endless promotional emails and offers can also further declutter your online life.

The reality is that we cannot fully separate real from online life anymore. In the modern world, they have become one, fused together through links that are at the core of who we are, who we know, what we like, and what we do. Navigating a new environment can prove to be nerve-wracking and exhausting for most of us. However, if organized and utilized with care, social media can be what it was always meant to be – something that brings people together.