Managing a Case of Social Media Overload

Over the past couple of weeks I've made a rather severe change to my social media habits. Basically, I deleted my Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts. The reason: I have been suffering from a typical time-suck case of social media overload.

Of course, going cold turkey always has its risks...for example, I ended up regretting deleting the Flickr account, so I immediately emailed customer support. Thankfully, they were able to restore my account and over 8,000 photos in just a couple of days. Kudos Yahoo! After all, I don't have a backup and it was kind of a rash decision ^_^;

With Flickr back up, I ended up setting the photos on personal, rather than public, access. The only exception was a set of favorite photos that I've captured and consider "special," to use as part of my portfolio.

For those instances I *really* want to share a photo, I just put it on Facebook or Instagram. All my old friends and acquaintances are on Facebook and a large majority has ended up following me on Instagram and Pinterest as well.

I really don't miss Twitter at all. I'm not sure why. But it's great not having to go there every five minutes to post when there's something actually going on in my 3D, real world life. Twitter makes you think everyone cares. That everyone thinks you're witty. That everyone wants to read every little thing. At least, if you don't start out that way, you sure end up doing that soon enough.

Rather than miss out on last-minute news and events, which is what I primarily used Twitter for when I first signed up, I now just check the weather.gov page, local newspaper sites, and RSS feeds more often! It really isn't that hard.

If I miss particular brands, products, music bands, or celebrities I just sign up for their e-newsletters on their websites. Easy peasy.

On Facebook, I'm slowly deleting all brands, bands, products, and stores from my feed and instead opting to sign up for e-newsletters for those that I really want to keep up with. It's made my Facebook feed a lot less manic to keep up with. I'd rather look at cute photos of parties and babies that old friends and acquaintances post, than what a marketing employee posted in support of a company's messaging strategy that day.

With the extra time that I've regained, now that I no longer have my nose in a social media app, I've been able to complete two e-books, started another e-book, and also started a print book. Oh, and I now have more hope of ever finishing Stephen King's The Dome too ^_^;

I'm also taking more deep breaths, stretching my body and getting up to walk, and turning and looking around more often to see what's going on. It's amazing what I've been able to notice now that I don't have my nose stuck in Twitter and Foursquare while I'm out and about. Though I do have my nose stuck in Kindle instead ^_^

I'm wondering whether others in my age range (mid-late 20s to mid-late 30s) are also experiencing this emergent need to unplug, and whether they've taken drastic (cold turkey) measures or just simply tuned out of their accounts for some time.