My Developers Life–The Social Media Diet
In the previous blog posts I discussed the importance of getting enough sleep and physical exercise. For this post I want to provide a quick shout out of the social media diet that I’m currently trying out.
My name is Jan and I don’t have a Facebook or a Netlog account of some kind. I do have a Google+ account that I haven’t visited in like four months. I also have a Twitter account that I’ve used quite often in the past. Currently I’m checking my Twitter account no more than two times a day for only a couple of minutes. Quite often I don’t visit it at all. Why? Because I let it all go.
I did not gain as much free time as I initially anticipated. But what I did gain was my ability to focus on stuff that I kept postponing for some time and more efficiency while doing it. Looking back, my brain feels less flooded and I no longer have that nagging urge that I’m missing out on information that is not really that important in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not entirely condemning social media either. I do get some value out of it, at the very least some entertainment only when I’m open for it. But I just let myself take some benefit from social media in the most superficial way as I possible can without getting too much involved. That way I’m able to pick up or learn something new without feeling like an informationholic.
I no longer have a Twitter client constantly running in the background. I also disabled all other kinds of notifications popping up like e-mail, … etc. And I must say that it works like a charm.
Close your browser or social media client and get out there! Exercise. Read a book. Learn a new programming language. Play with your kids. Listen to some music. Garden. Anything. No one on his dead bed ever said, “I wish I had wasted more time using social media”. Don’t be afraid to miss out on that one tweet or message, because you’re probably already lost track of what’s really important.
Until next time.
Nice one Jan. Currently its my routine to get from office, take a shower and open my laptop. And then keep doing something on it, blog something, facebook …. I am trying hard to break this because once I have done my stuff I feel I have lost the d., I think my wife is more than happy to help on this :).
Currently I’m doing some stuff in and around the house during the evenings. I’m amazed at how much stuff I get done in just a couple of hours. After that, I’m doing some short focused work at my home PC (home projects, learning, etc. …). This way I’m not able to diverge to social media because that would mean I lose quality time with my family during or afterwards which, as you said, the wife or kids will remind you about the priorities :-).
Great post! I’m thinking about this what you wrote for some time. I for instance beside the things you mentioned I am reading a lot of blogs with my RSS reader, and I can’t keep up. When I miss out one day reading I have like dozens of new posts, and then I’m applying a triage which one to read which one to mark as read and so on. I think you gave me an eyeopener, to focus really on some practical work that I can reuse rather then reading stuff all the time not having the time to apply it. I’ll take your post as a new mantra. 🙂 Thanks!
Reading blogs is certainly not a bad thing. I successfully reduced the number of blogs that I’m reading to the ones I truly value. This enabled me to just read those once or twice a week without falling too much behind. This frees up some spare time where you can do other stuff, like reading a good book instead or practice some coding.