Yes, it’s true. I’ve been removed from social media for almost 2 yrs! All of my past business posts were posted by office staff and not myself and the only networks I frequented were Facebook and Pinterest. At my clients’ requests, I am coming out from under my rock and getting up with the times. My last Facebook post was somewhere in summer 2018, Woah!
It’s crazy as someone so removed to see that people are spending 2.5hrs a day on social media. As a fellow parent of children under 6, I can barely find time to pee by myself let alone scroll through social.
What was it like to be off so long? Honestly, I felt relieved to be out of the noise. Maybe it’s my inner hippie or introverted self, but it was nice not to constantly be bothered.
Then my business coach gave me the look I was dreading…the one that said, “You want an online business? You know what you have to do.” And he was right, social is where the people are. (Insert Arial Mermaid singing, “I want to be where the people are…”).
So here we go…I feel like I’m 4yrs old and standing on the edge of the deep end in a pool. I have fishy goggles on my eyes, swimmies on my arms, a donut raft around my waste and I am reaching my hand up to plug my nose and I take the inevitable plunge into social media.
Here are the top 3 things I learned being off social:
- If people want to reach out to you, they will find a way. All the folks that REALLY needed me found a way to e-mail or text me.
- Notifications induce anxiety in a big way. Once I deleted social from my phone, I also turned off all notifications. I literally had this phantom anxiety of pings and dings for almost a whole freakin’ month. I would swear I felt my phone vibrate and check it. Sometimes I would just check it expecting something. That’s scary from a psychological standpoint. After that initial anxiety went away, silence is worth it in a noisy world.
- I am in control of the content I consume. If you use the screen time feature on your phone you can receive a report each week of how much social you consume. I learned about the news from close friends and Saturday Night Live. I was more deliberate of the content I consumed and mindful of how much time I spent on it. For Buzzfeed videos of delicious recipes I will never cook or celebrities picking your nose (just making sure you’re still reading), I set a timer of 5 minutes. Once the timer went off, I got back to what mattered.
What is it like for me to come back on?:
It’s been interesting. I went back on Facebook to create a business community page and also decided to update my profile picture. Literally within seconds, my laptop starting pinging and dinging like it was going to explode! I looked at the top and saw I had 171 messages and over 1200 notifications, it was overwhelming, to say the least. My immediate reaction was like “Ahhhhh! Throw the laptop and run for the hills!” I quickly signed off.
In the days proceeding my return to Facebook (after turning off all the sounds), I also received a slew of text messages from people I do not talk with on a normal basis welcoming me back, asking where I’ve been, etc. I felt like a salmon attempting to swim upstream in a garbage-filled river. This was temporary though. Now I am back on and on my terms. I still have notifications on my phone turned off and I set time limits to what I do on social. Eventually, when our world gets back to normal I plan to start going through messages and responding when I can.
How I plan to use social going forward:
- I am excited to reconnect with old friends and connect to new ones! The connection is what social media is about.
- I hope to grow the Life Design community so I and others can help each other on all the platforms, which I am curious to see how it grows over the next year. I also want to use the group as a place to discuss the blog posts to generate interesting conversations.
I am thrilled to welcome you to join me on social at the top of this website!
Being an online business now is going to be an amazing journey, I can feel it! Coming from having past brick and mortar offices, I just can’t help but sense all of the positive vibes that will come from reaching more people online than an office space ever could.
I look forward to connecting and helping you design the life you want!
