I’d like to be more intentional about how I use social media. There are many reasons for this: to embrace deep work, escape the dark playground, and generally reduce my day-to-day anxieties from fear of missing out and being driven to distraction. 👻

Strategies

• I have deactivated Facebook.
• I have deleted slack from my phone.
• I have removed Twitter from my phone and tablet.
• I have deleted other distracting sites like Reddit from my browser history, and logged out of these accounts.

These actions were easy.

Twitter Schedule

Unfortunately, removing Twitter entirely has been difficult, because so much of the academic community is intertwined with it. My approach is to introduce artificial latency by checking Twitter more infrequently: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are Twitter-free days.

I also periodically delete tweets (usually once a year) and consider them to be ephemeral. This reduces the “social media debt” otherwise required to engage with older, less relevant tweets.

Productive Procrastination

I’m not a point where I can avoid procrastination entirely, but at least I can be productive about it through reasonable alternatives:

• GetAbstract offers 10-minute summaries of popular nonfiction books. These summaries feel “tweet-sized” and help me fill in otherwise short and unproductive gaps in my day.
• Libby provides access to public library eBooks.
• Similarly, O’Reilly provide access to a large catalog of technical content.
• I have subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
• If I don’t want to read, PluralSight has content in video form.