Life is going by so quickly. Sometimes I feel like I need to find the pause button and just have a moment to gather my thoughts. But I love how full life feels. Over the last few years when I felt the need to pause things it was generally because I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that life was passing me by. These days I feel much more connected with what is happening around me. If I was into using the ‘right’ phrases I would probably tell you I am working at ‘living consciously’.
I still feel like I am battling to fit everything in, I still lose the ability {and desire} to speak after 9pm and I imagine alot of people would still say I’m glued to my phone and use social media too much. But I think I am more present in my ‘real’ life, and have found better balance.
My experience with social media is the more you use it the more you need to use it. You get sucked into stories, conversations and themes. So here are some of the things I have done to try to step away.
1. To begin with I turned off all notifications between 9pm and 6am. It helped protect my ‘sit on the sofa eating, watching a little tv and chatting bits through with Mark’ time.
2. Then I moved all icons into a folder and placed it onto my second page of my phone rather than in the bottom ‘menu’ bar to make it less convenient to access.
3. Control what you see in your timelines and newsfeeds. Facebook culls and twitter tidies are normal phrases these days. But you can be cleverer than that. You can hide people on facebook or make use of groups – if you mark people as an acquaintance you see less of them on your newsfeed and it is easy to set your publishing to friends except acquaintances to filter what they can see from you. Twitter applications such as echofon which I use, has a mute function for users and hashtags. I’m also in the process of setting up lists so I can read tweets based on a category of users, parents, bloggers, celebrities. Lists can be public or private so you might also want to consider a private ‘favs’ list and maybe a private ‘unfollow’ list for people that you are questioning whether to follow or not.
4. I have now turned off notifications for twitter, facebook and instagram. It means that I check every now and then and read a chunk of posts rather than responding to 1 item and then getting sucked into a social media black hole.
5. Which has led me to find that, particularly during quality family times, I often don’t look at my phone for chunks of time. We were at an animal park for an afternoon a few weeks ago and I didn’t check my phone until I was home. It surprised me, and it felt liberating.
As for what next…I want to blog more frequently. I toy with the idea of a social media free day, or weekend. The idea makes me kind of nervous and uncomfortable, which is similar to my reaction when someone tells me I should give-up coffee. Neither is a particularly healthy response which probably means I really should do it. I’m also thinking of ‘outing’ my blog to friends, family, colleagues.
How do you find balance with blogging, social media and life?