3 No-Frills Solutions to Stop Social Media Ruining Your Productivity
I’ve spent the first couple of weeks of the year talking to a lot of my readers and other students about what really stops them from studying as well as they would like.
The overwhelming response is “Distractions from Social Media”.
Here are 3 no-frills solutions to combat this-
1. Set Yourself a Daily Limit
One of my goals for this year is to cut my own usage. I usually try to use social media for practical purposes such as actually interacting with people and posting things I find useful and interesting.
But alas, despite my understanding of the psychology behind these ingeniously designed interfaces, I too still find myself on a perpetual scroll far more often than I’d like.
While I wouldn’t call myself addicted, I thought one of the ways to combat my excessive usage was to raise my self-awareness of it.
I did this through buying a simple countdown kitchen timer and at the start of the year setting it to 60mins each day. I’d then start the countdown every time I went on any form of social media. I’d stop it once I stopped scrolling.
I soon realised how quickly that 60mins was being eaten up and it immediately made me aware of how much time I was actually wasting on these platforms- definitely at least a couple of hours most days. And most of that was spent doing stuff that was neither practical nor even enjoyable.
It’s only when we’re shown how much we consume something that we realise how shocking it is. And by setting a limit you quickly become aware of excess.
Have I managed to stick to 60mins a day? No, not yet. But I have cut down significantly and my usage is much more purposeful. I’ve learnt to be more social on social media and not use it to just passively and pointlessly ‘snoop’.
2. Schedule Your Usage
Sometimes you do need a mindless scroll just to take your mind off things for a while or to have a break from studying or working. That’s fine.
But again, it’s worth nothing that these platforms are engineered in ways that have the sole aim of keeping you on them for as long as possible. Zuckerberg was majoring in Psychology before dropping out of Harvard. He knows and understands human behaviour better than most people in the world and that’s how he’s been able to craft a platform over a billion people in the world have to go on at least once a day.
If the time that you go on is random, you will get trapped.
So instead, schedule when you go on.
I call this “Scheduled Procrastination". It’s something I’ve done in the past during revision periods- actually putting in a 30 minute slot in my diary to flick through BBC sport, check my social feeds and watch some Youtube clips of Gordon Ramsay savaging people.
For me there are two benefits to this-
1) It actually brings back some enjoyment in these platforms as you’ve got something to look forward to.?
2) It automatically reminds you to not get trapped on them for hours and hours- I’ll get a 10-min notification for the next study slot in my diary and I’ll get straight back to work.
3. Hijack Your Usage
When I was studying for my finals another thing I did was realise no matter what I did I’d still have my lapses and mindlessly open the ‘Social’ folder on my phone and flick from app to app.
So instead of fighting the system I thought of something better.
For my revision I was using an online flashcard creation site called Cram.com and noticed they also had an app so that you can have all your resources on-the-go.
I downloaded the app and placed it as the first app in my social folder- see below-
Whenever I went for a social media scroll I’d then force myself to revise 5 minutes of flashcards first.
This made a huge difference in the memorisation of content as all those 5 minutes seriously added up over the weeks in build-up to my finals.
Simply put, sometimes you’ve got to infiltrate instead of eliminate.
Summary
Hopefully one of these three suggestions can help you not just cut down on your social media usage but also give you a better relationship with it.
We often forget how amazing these platforms are and the good they’ve done for us when used with their original purpose in mind- social connection.
Next time you jump on- stop scrolling and start contributing. The positive interactions that come from this can actually end up boosting your productivity.
More study tips & access to my "Top 5 Performance Enhancing Hacks Guide" can be found at https://www.perfpsysam.com/