Last week I closed my browser windows with Facebook and Twitter in them, and shut down the same apps on my iPhone.
I was fed up. I found myself staring aimlessly at the feeds, scrolling and scanning updates from friends and links to stuff somebody thought I should read. I would waste tens of minutes out of my day, just doing nothing but scanning.
Nice to see what my friends were doing, but I also realized that FB and Twitter also minimized the need to actually see them in real life. I felt like I knew what they were doing, so why bother to try to meet up and catch up when I already knew what they were up to?
The links being sent around were getting more and more purposeless – many were just linkbait, trying to get me to take a look at some fantastic thing, which once you dug deeper was pretty inane and really meant nothing for my knowledge, but only sucked up more of my valuable time to go take a look.
So I left. It’s been a week and an interesting one. There is a bit of withdrawal symptoms there but nothing I can’t handle. But now I find myself doing more real world stuff to fill my time. Stuff like just getting up from sitting in front of my Mac and moving around. Practicing my movement skills: posture, sitting, standing, squatting, sometimes doing some pull ups or push ups, maybe a few one legged squats. Being not confined to the chair is truly refreshing.
I get on the floor and mess around with my kids. They don’t see me in front of the Mac or staring mindlessly at my phone any more. I interact with them, let them climb all over me. There is nothing more satisfying than hearing the triumphant giggles of a child who has climbed from the floor all the way to sit on top of your head!
I read the stack of virtual books in my Kindle – stuff I wasn’t reading because I was mindlessly staring at status updates. How nice to read real writing and not the quick stuff that people just pump out there to get you to click and then make money off your ads…and your valuable attention.
Still I find that while I have not been to either site, I think there is still some value that may make me return. These would be:
1. Friends still message me on FB and DM me on Twitter. If that happens, I should go back to answer.
2. On FB pages, there are the equivalent of groups where I am a member. I may still need to go back to ask a question or reply.
3. Asking for advice is helpful on either platform. I may need to do that from time to time.
4. If I blog, like this post, I can get readership by posting there – assuming that after this post people still want to hear from me even though I’ve largely forsaken these two sites. I have a Socialflow account and can use that to find the optimal time to post a link. So as a distribution mechanism for blog posts, FB and Twitter still work well.
5. The one thing I have not found a great solution for is real news recommender. I went back to Netvibes to see if that would work but so many of the feeds were dead. And there is no filtering there. I am hoping my friends at Digg will revive News.me and get better at news delivery…and not linkbait delivery.
Yes I may go back for some things, but largely, I will not be mindlessly staring at feeds any more, but instead going out there and doing things I really need to be doing, spending time with real people, and enjoying the real world.