Thinking about Time, Goals, and Social Media

A few years back, after I first installed RescueTime, I got it into my head to reduce the amount of time I was spending on Facebook and Twitter.  

Lots of people decide to do this, but it rarely exceeds. For one thing, social media companies excel at luring you in. It’s easy to use them to fill the blank times, the little moments where there’s a break in your attention and you’re looking for distraction.

For another, ‘doing less’ of something is one of those vague definitions of success. How much less do you want? How do you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, beyond trusting your gut?

I recently had a conversation about this where I realised how important RescueTime actually was in cutting back. The service tracked time I spent on apps or using certain programs, telling me exactly how many hours and minutes I spent on social media every week.

I could weigh those hours against the time spent doing other things, and I had a specific goal to achieve: get my social media time under an hour a day.

That’s a really specific goal. The kind where you can make active choices about how you’re going to achieve it, and where there’s a really clear line where those efforts are successful. The numbers were there, laid out in black and white, contrasted against the time I spent writing or doing research or playing games every week. 

I’ve not paid attention to my reports as much these days, but I’m changing the way I use social media at the moment and it’s time to start monitoring again. Making sure that my usage isn’t creeping up a little further than I’d like it to be.