Think about this question carefully: why are you using social media?
What is it that you are doing? What are you looking at?
What type of content are you consuming? How does it make you feel?
Aside from posting on your profile and killing the FOMO by looking at other people’s posts, other reasons may be to find:
- Entertainment
- Education
- Inspiration
When you know what type of content you are looking for on social media, ask yourself:
In what way do I find inspirational content?
How am I actually entertained?
What am I really learning? How am I becoming smarter?
You see, sometimes social media is not the right platform to fulfill those objectives.
Education? You may want to look for complete (paid) courses to obtain skills instead.
In addition, you may want to find different websites to find out what’s happening in the world or what the weather is going to be like for example.
If you want to reduce your social media time, you will want to find replacement websites where you find the same information you would find on social media.
This same concept applies to entertainment and inspiration as well.
Aren’t there other ways to get inspired or entertained?
Of course there are.
Think of other websites and places where you can find inspiration and entertainment.
Read newsletters from people in the self-development industry instead of scrolling endlessly to find the next best quote for example.
The more you fulfill certain social media objectives in other places, the less time you need to spend on social media.
Or, what you can do is to pick 1 social media platform that you use for inspiration let’s say.
So use Instagram for inspiration and Tik Tok for entertainment purposes for example.
Although I would only recommend this when you are already able to get yourself out of the rabbit hole you quickly enter when using an app like Tik Tok.
Or use 1 social media app to engage with friends instead of 3 different apps for that exact same purpose.
Get clear on what it is you are actually doing on social media. What’s the objective?
Understand why you’re spending (wasting?) so much of your time on a particular social media app.
Then find different replacement sources that will help you meet those objectives.
Not only will this reduce the necessity to use social media.
Certain information and content are also better to be found elsewhere than on social media.