My Social Media Hiatus – Part 1 – The Beginning

I fully admit I am completely and utterly addicted to the internet, including social media. I am one of those people who checks their phone non-stop. I tweet. I post on Facebook. I post pictures on Instagram. I thoroughly enjoy the act of connecting with people on the internet and posting my thoughts and ideas.

Obviously, there is a huge downside to spending this much time online. I am constantly distracted both at work and at home. I find myself rocking my 1-month old son and scrolling Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Or, waking up at 3 am randomly and checking my phone for Twitter notifications. Virtually everything I do is disrupted. As much as I love social media, it is a huge disruption to other things in my life.

For this reason, I have decided to do a self-imposed experiment and stay off social media for the entire month of January (2019). I have already deleted the apps from my phone. If nothing else, just to see what life is like without it for a while. My hope is that I find some enlightenment out of this and it will tell me some changes I need to make. My wife and I have talked for months about a “no phone” policy at home, meaning we keep out phones in our room and don’t take it out. We have tried it several times but always revert back.

What I expect to happen during this hiatus is something like this:

• The first few days will be like “whoa this is interesting and I am thinking more and paying attention to stuff easier, cool”.
• After the novelty wears off, I will start to really, really want to go check social media. I will wonder if this is really worth it.
• Then maybe I get some sort of depression.
• I will eventually not really think about it much towards the end of the month and find other things to do with my time. Perhaps I am able to concentrate on tasks more.

Well, here we go. I will probably be posting on my blog updates during the month. Ironically, my posts will automatically create a Twitter post, but rest assure, I won’t “be” on Twitter. Happy New Year to all!