READING TIME: 3 MINUTES
Why you should stop spending time on social media aligns well with parts of a framework I use for deciding what books to read. Difference is the time intervals, needs to be relative to the time spent taking in the information.
A book will normally take a couple of hours to read while a Facebook post will take seconds or minutes. When reading, the term digesting is normally used as in; understand or assimilate information.
Answer these questions:
Will you still care about the content you're digesting in 1 h from now? tomorrow? in a week? in a month?
Most likely you have a lot of screen time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube. You can also forget about the term digesting and switch it to consuming; filling one's mind and attention.
Good news is that it's easy to pinpoint where you are wasting time - if you answered no and examine your social media habits you will most likely arrive at one or more of these social media channels.
Get in the habit of always asking yourself "Do I really need to do this?" when scrolling through your Facebook or Instagram feed or doing things in general. Stop wasting time, you have a choice.
Time is the only resource in the world which you can not create more of. You should spend your time wisely. Most people don't - you are one of them if you waste time consuming social media content.
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. - Seneca
If you answered yes to these questions then you probably curated a feed and get useful content on topics you are interested in (Twitter) or digesting a feed related to the industry you are in or specific skills you work with professionally or simply using it to network (LinkedIn).
To curate a good feed, Twitter is by far the best choice and the format allows for diverse content - text, video, links. Twitter also allows you to connect beyond just family, friends and professional network. Anonymous Twitter handles are allowed and many handles producing valuable content are anonymous - it often allows for more honest content.
On LinkedIn you connect with professionals and companies. Normally within your industry or line of work (coding, marketing, sales and so on) where content shared is relevant to you since it's part of your work, service or product. LinkedIn tend to be superficial since it is directly linked to the professional part of a persons life and there is a great deal of virtue signalling going on.
Social media isn't all bad, the following accounts create valuable social media content you will remember 1h from reading it, the day after, after a week, a month and even a year:
