The famous management consultant,
Peter Drucker, once said, "Tell me
"what you value, and I might believe you,
"but show me your calendar and
"your bank statement, and I'll show
"you what you really value."
And it's true.
While I might say that I value truth,
justice, and always eating my spinach,
a detailed look into those two troves
of information would yield quite different answers.
Digging into my bank statements would reveal an enormous
amount of money spent of coffee,
and wooden gnomes from eBay, and a look
at my calendar, not my Google calendar,
but an actual real-time log of
my life's events, if such a thing were possible
to build, would shed light upon way more time
than I care to admit, spent scrolling through Instagram,
and Twitter, and other social media apps.
And I would bet that if we were
to look at your calendar, we would see
something similar, if not worse.
Comparisons aside, though, I think
it is safe to say that most of us,
myself included, spend more of
our time and attention than we would like
to on these apps, if we were to look
at our lives from a more rational birds-eye view.
And that is why, today, I wanna give
you some tips for breaking your social media addiction.
Whether you actually call it an addiction,
or whether you're in denial.
Now, as astute and long-time viewers
of this channel may know, I am a big fan
of the author Kyle Newport, especially
his book Deep Work, which
actually has a chapter called Quit Social Media.
Given that fact, you may be surprised
to know that I'm not gonna recommend quitting social media
in this video.
At least, not right up front, and
that's because I'm an advocate
of moderation, and I also recognize
that social media can bring a lot of benefits,
but along with those benefits come drawbacks,
and as the ex-Facebook data scientist,
Jeffrey Hammerbacher once said,
"The best minds of my generation are thinking
"about how to make people click ads."
And of course, to make you click
those ads, those minds also have
to think about how to keep you
on their platforms for as long as possible,
which means that, at the very least,
these things are meticulously engineered
to be huge time-sinks, but that isn't the
only criticism you can level against them.
They also can make you a less happy person,
as repeated research has shown.
When you're spending a ton of your time scrolling through
these feeds of meticulously crafted posts
that show the highlights of people's lives,
including people that you probably know
in real life, and you're comparing them,
sometimes subconsciously, to your own life,
the entire thing, warts and all,
you can start to make comparisons
that really put a damper on your happiness.
So the question is, how do you use
these tools, and treat them like tools,
to get their benefits, while avoiding the drawbacks.
Let's start off with something
that is very easy to do, kill your notifications.
Notifications are like that ringing bell
that made Pavlov's dogs salivate,
only instead of giving you food,
they deliver a quick dopamine rush
in the form of a new comment, or DM,
or post from someone else.
Now, there is nothing wrong with checking
these posts, or answering your DMs,
but when you look at them in response
to a notification, you are establishing a habit,
you are establishing a craving,
and when those notifications come,
in the future, you're going
to have fewer mental defenses for avoiding them.
And the problem, here, is that
these notifications have no respect
for your time, or the fact that
you need long, uninterrupted periods
of concentration to actually get your work done.
So go into your phone's notification settings,
for each and every social media app
that you have, and destroy those notifications.
Secondly, I'm going to suggest
that you redesign your phone's home screen
to remove all social media apps from it,
and this is something that I actually did recently.
You may have seen the video that
I put out just a couple of months ago,
on my iPhone home screen, but even
that home screen layout has now gone the way
of the dodo, because it had social media apps on there.
I think Twitter was on there, and Instagram was on there.
And at the time, I kind of justified it,
because, as a content creator,
I use those platforms for my work.
But I am also a consumer, on those platforms,
and more often than I liked, I found
myself scrolling through them,
wasting my time, so I just got them
entirely off my home screen.
I created an entire second page
of apps on my phone, and I buried all
those social media apps inside of folders.
So if I wanna go to one, I have to look for it.
It's a very intentional thing.
Now, if you are on an iPhone, like me,
there is one thing you have to do,
beyond just shoving those apps into folders,
You have to actually turn off Siri's suggestions,
as well, because, in my case, when
I would swipe down to search for a different app
that wasn't on my home screen,
I would always see Instagram and Twitter sitting
there, which is basically the same thing
as having them on the home screen.
So if you are on an iPhone, you can go
into the settings, you can go into Siri app suggestions,
and you can disable them on an app-by-app basis.
Now, to suggest another option
that would actually negate the need
to do all of that, what if you
only used social media on your computer?
The problem with social media apps
on your phone, and one of the biggest things
we're trying to get away from, here,
is that they can become pervasive
throughout your entire life, and
that's because your phone is in
your pocket, or in your purse, all day long,
meaning you have constant, easy access to these tools.
But if you were to delete all these apps
off of your phone, you'd still be able
to use most of them on your computer,
in a more deliberate manner.
Maybe some of them are a little bit hard
to access, like Snapchat.
I'm not even sure if you can get
to that on a computer, but most
of them do have a desktop site,
and in fact, my friend Martin
even found a way to post his photos on
his Instagram profile using a desktop computer.
So if you're finding yourself
mindlessly opening Twitter, or Snapchat,
or Instagram, on your phone all the time,
try deleting those apps from your phone,
and just using them on a computer, for awhile.
See how that works out for you.
Now, going back to that problem
of social media becoming pervasive,
throughout your entire life, the next suggestion
I have is to deliberately only use
it at a specific time of the day.
Treat social media like you treat Netflix,
or video games, or anything else
that you only do at specific places and times,
and if you wanted help enforcing this,
you could use a Website and app blocking tool,
like Freedom, which is the one that I use,
and this has been a very helpful tool for me.
I use it to block all sorts of social media sites,
things like Reddit and Hacker News,
and all kinds of other places that
I tend to waste time on, during
my mornings, so that way, instead
of procrastinating during those hours,
I'm writing, or I'm reading, or I'm
actually getting my work done.
Now, so far, all we've talked about is the binary choice
of using these social media apps
at specific times of the day or not using them,
but this next tip actually kind
of gets into the middle ground,
because social media tools and apps are
actually collections of many different features.
Take Facebook, for example.
Facebook has the news feed, but
it also has the messenger tool,
and it also has the events tool,
and the groups tool, and some of
those tools might actually be very useful
to you, like messenger, or the groups,
while others, like the news feed,
may be completely valueless in your life.
So instead of asking yourself,
"Should I block it or should I use it?"
what if you blocked certain features.
And if you use a tool like Todobook,
you can actually block the news feeds
of most major social media platforms,
and other Websites, like Reddit and Hacker News,
so you can only use the more useful functions,
and when you go to look at the news feed,
you're gonna see a to-do list,
reminding you of things that
you're supposed to be doing, instead.
Okay, so we've talked about all
of the rational middle ground answers,
and now we're going to get to the question
of, should you quit social media?
Or should you at least stop using
certain social media platforms
in the way that you are currently using them?
So in his book, Deep Work, the author,
Kyle Newport, talks about
something called the "any benefit approach",
which is something that people use
to justify using social media tools.
They basically say, if there's any benefit
that I can get out of this, that might improve
my life, no matter how small of an improvement
it may make, I am justified in using it.
And, as he writes in the book,
"The problem with this approach,
"of course, is that it ignores all the negatives
"that come along with the tools in question.
"These services are engineered
"to be addictive, robbing time
"and attention from activities that more directly support
"your professional and personal goals."
So if those goals are a priority
for you, then you should seriously ask
yourself, "Do I need all the social media accounts
"that I currently have?"
And you can also get more granular than that, as well,
such as asking, "Do I need this particular app on my phone?"
For example, I don't keep the Pinterest app
on my phone, because I find that
it's just a time-waster, there,
but I haven't deleted my account entirely,
because I do find it to be a useful repository
of design, inspiration, and ideas,
that I can go look at, when
I wanna, say, redesign my Website.
But, on the other hand, I found,
recently, that Snapchat offered
me no value, whatsoever, so I actually went
in and deleted my account, there.
And that brings me to my final tip,
here, which is for people who feel
that they are truly addicted to the social media platforms.
If of all the other tips in this video haven't helped
you so far, if you just can't resist opening
these apps and wasting your time on them,
then try a 30 day serious social media detox.
Get completely away from all of it.
And the first step to doing that would be deleting
those social media apps off of your phone,
blocking the Websites on your computer,
making it generally as difficult as possible to access them.
Keep in mind that your ability
to maintain self-discipline is highly influenced
by your environment, so just like
somebody who's on a diet and trying
to avoid junk food needs to get all the junk food out
of their house, you need to get all
of the access to social media out
of your immediate vicinity.
And then, once that 30 days is up, you can start
to slowly reintroduce these tools back
into your life, and see if you can use
them in a way that does benefit you,
but doesn't cause you to waste too much time.
And then, once you've gained back
that time that you were previously wasting,
scrolling through your Facebook and Instagram feeds,
you may want to dedicate some of
it to improving your creative problem solving skills,
as well as your skills in the fields
of math, science, and computer science.
And if that's something that you do want
to do, you should check out Brilliant.
Brilliant is a math and science enrichment tool
that takes an incredibly active approach to learning.
So when you go into their courses,
you're going to be immediately thrown
into challenging problems that force
you to really work to find the solutions,
and in addition to being a very effective way
to learn these subjects, this approach
also makes you a universally better problem solver,
because you have to apply effort
and creativity, rather than just
passively intaking the material,
like you would in a lecture-style class.
Within Brilliant's library, you're gonna find courses
on calculus, on math for quantitative finance,
on probability, on science topics,
like gravitational physics, and computer science topics,
like algorithms and machine learning.
In addition, you're also going
to find an incredibly detailed wiki
that covers problems from all across
their courses, so when you get stuck
on something tough, you can go do
some in-depth learning there, and
there's also an awesome community area,
where people from around the world are
constantly helping each other out,
and challenging each other.
So if you wanna start learning
for free, today, then head on over
to brilliant.org/thomasfrank, which
you'll find in the description down below.
And if you're one of the first 83 people
to sign up with that link, you're
also gonna get 20% off your annual premium subscription.
I wanna give a big thanks to Brilliant
for sponsoring this video, and being a huge supporter
of this channel, and, as always, guys,
thank you so much for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, hit that like button,
to support this channel, and you can
also subscribe right there,
to get new videos every single week.
You can also click right over here
to get a free copy of my book on
how to earn better grades, find one more video
on this channel right over here,
or follow me on Instagram, over @TomFrankly.
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
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