Lately, I found myself browsing and spending lot of time either watching funny videos on Facebook, Youtube or browsing feeds in Instagram. Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my #todolist, I get sucked in. I swear scrolling is addictive.
I post random selfies, group pictures, announcements, stories, events, and updates especially when it’s about travel and new experiences. I’m happy to share good news and even bad. I’ve been in this inner circle for a long time already. Social media active, killing time scrolling on post and on and on. I’m guilty of mindlessly browsing and scrolling, it consumes a lot of time in my mind and energy. I know I have a task to do in front of my computer but suddenly I’m checking my notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting my task.
Whenever I hop onto my social media accounts I ended up liking, posting, commenting and even lurking so much time. I want to change and focus. Therefore, I plan to remove those activities as much possible unless I actively choose to.
So I decided to fast from posting updates and browsing longer.
The deal is I will not post photos in Instagram for 60 days, generally taking a break from it, especially for Instagram app.
Yes, two months.
In 60 days instead of browsing and doing nothing I learned to..
- Less is more – I turn off all Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Gmail, etc. mobile notifications and I felt an immediate feeling of freedom. My mind feels a bit clearer. I also cleaned up my Facebook news feeds. I hide post of some people who constantly complaining about life, I don’t want to read rants and people that frequently post numerous updates that I don’t care so there’s more room for my real friends -it’s freer.
- Never stop learning – Change routine and invest in yourself instead of giving all our energy browsing. I signed up FreeCodeCamp and back to coding again. I continue my Duolingo, Spanish lessons and catching up with Level 10. I give more time reading blogs that interest me about travels, health, and personal improvements. I stay longer in Quora because I love reading real life experiences and there’s a lot to learn from. I still want to continue practice writing in Calligraphy.
- Be active and present, spending time with family and friends – We watched movies, ride a bike at East Coast, celebrated birthday’s with families and friends, thanksgiving with new work and pass approval, etc. We had lot of activities, in short, I realized what really matters is at the end of the day, you are alive with your family and friends, spending time with them. And since we are OFW’s, we make sure to update our family directly.
- Create hobbies directed toward your dreams – When I did the social media fast, I’m starting to get more focused on God’s plan for me. I want to reach my dreams.
- Be grateful for what you already have – Every so often I’m browsing to see other people feeds on their profile. It inspires me. Some post their nice set of new make-ups, travels, eat outs in fancy restaurants, etc. and I wanted to the same. A constant pursuit of having more of the newest and best is never ending, I get overwhelmed. It’s time to learn how to be more grateful and positive even without posting a social media status.
There’s many things that happened in last 60 days. Now, I leave my phone when we are cooking, go out for jogging and even when I’m at home. I do not check my accounts regularly. I don’t see wrong in using social media, I love Facebook and Instagram, I just want to stop and pause a while. I wanted to know how does it feels if it’s not part of my daily routine.
I totally missed to document online, but inside my heart I’m really thankful for the time we spent. I keep photos on my phone, my friends posted photos and tagged me in, I’m more than thankful. Not posting any doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring, I just want to be present without thinking of a task to post it on #atm. I will still post those photos maybe on my Facebook albums.
I’m happy, productive and alive. Yes, I’m back on posting back in my Instagram and Facebook again. It’s nice to use it as visual reminder, see comments, tagged post, and updates but I don’t want to go back to my old routine spending lot of time browsing and ended up accomplish nothing. I love to pursue creating things – coding, art, writing.
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