Distract me if you can 🧐 (me 🆚 social media)
Social media 🌐 have changed human 👨👦👦 interactions and enabled the creation of endless entertaining/distracting 🧐 content every day. I remember that I used to use social media apps 🤳 without feeling the need to impose any restriction ❌, but after countless scrolling 😵 on Facebook, Twitter… feed and getting lost in some YouTube “rabbit 🐇 holes”, I started to set up few restriction rules 🚫 in my usage, and that’s what I want to share with you in this article 📰 😊
Without further ado, let the battles begin 🔥
Me vs Facebook 🌍
No Facebook app on my phone 📱 🚫 (except the Facebook Messenger App)
I only check my Facebook feed from my PC 💻 about ~ once a week and in order to avoid seeing 👀 the feed every time I log in to FB on my PC, I use the News Feed Eradicator extension 🧩
So by default, when I go to Facebook, I see a nice random citation 😌 instead of the feed 📜
If I want to see the news feed, I have to click 🖱️ on the extension icon then choose for how much time ⏱️ I allow myself to scroll the infinite feed 😁
By not having the Facebook App on my phone 📱, I’m less tempted to check the feed every time I’m bored 😉
Me vs YouTube 📺
No YouTube App on my phone 📱 🚫 (installed by default on my Android, so I disabled it)
I access YouTube on my phone 📱 only through the browser, I personally use the Brave mobile browser that manages to block 🛑 all YouTube Ads 👌, sorry Google 😅. It also offers this great feature “the ability to keep playing a YouTube video in the background”, so sometimes I just listen 🎧 to some interesting YT videos as podcasts 👌
On my desktop 💻 browser, I use the following Chrome extension Unhook — Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, which manages to remove ❌ all the distracting YT recommendations, I also use a YT ad blocker extension to avoid ✋ the disturbing ads that popups at the beginning of each video (again sorry Google 😝)
Yeah, so when I go to YouTube on my PC, I see this gray emptiness (Ah, what a relief !🧘♂️)
And when I search 🔎 for a video 📼 I see a clean frame without any other recommendations and of course no ads ✌
Me vs Twitter 🐦
No Twitter App on my phone 📱 🚫
Same as Facebook I only check the Twitter feed from my desktop 💻 and by default, it is blocked 🛑 by the same News Feed Eradicator extension 🧩
In fact, I rarely use Twitter nowadays, In the past, I have been using it during big events 📅 or when there is breaking news 📰 to see what people are talking 🗣️ about,
Another practical 👌 use case of Twitter for me is to request support 🤙, when I have issues 🚩 with services that I use
Me vs LinkedIn 💼
No LinkedIn App on my phone 📱 🚫
I check LinkedIn only on my PC 💻 (during working days), Like Facebook, I also use the News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension to block 🛑 the feed by default.
I also enabled ✅ the private mode 🕵️ on LinkedIn, so when I visit a profile, he/she does not get notified, and I don’t get notified or know who visited my profile (don’t care anyway 😄)
I disabled ❌ the reaction 👍 notifications 🔕 so I don’t get notified when someone reacts to my posts 📝, you can do this by clicking on the “…” next to a like notification and click disable this kind of notifications 🔔
LinkedIn is the social media on which I’m the most active, I publish a post 📝 almost every week in order to have some influence 😊, but to keep the pace 💨 I use the buffer website with which I can plan 📅 few posts ahead.
Me vs Instagram 🖼️
I have Instagram on my phone 📱 ✅
- All notifications are disabled 🔕
- Like counter is hidden 👍🚫
I’m not really an addict 💊 of this media, I have created my personal 👤 account recently, on which I post some Reels videos 📼 that I edit.
Here is one of my average weekly activity on the app 😊
Me vs Snapchat & TikTok 🆕
No Snapchat & TikTok App on my phone 📱 🚫
I have already tried Snapchat 👻 , I wanted to test the AR Filters and effects, and to understand the app that my teenage nephew is using 😁. I uninstalled it, but I use the desktop Snap Camera App 📹 on my PC, which offers all the snap filters that can be applied during a meeting 👌 (Teams, G meet, Zoom…)
Here I’m in a Teams meeting with the snap Cartoon 3D style filter 😅
Regarding TikTok, Yeah I admitted it 😁, I once had the app on my phone 🙈 (for some weeks), I wanted to try the app and understand how it got popular 📈 so fast. After testing it, I can confirm that if you have nothing to do with your life, TikTok can be very addictive 😅
Joke aside 😏, I still use TikTok sometimes but only through the browser (yes you can access tiktok.com it’s similar to the app) to get some creativity boost 🚀, thanks to TikTok I rediscover my video 📹 editing ✂️ hobby that I use to do on desktop 💻 long time ago, now I do all the editing on my phone 📱 using CapCut (app from the same company that made TikTok)
Yeah, that is all I have to share about my battle 🔥 with social media 🌐, I know all these rules I described may seem drastic 😱, but good luck 🤞 managing your social media time without any rule 🙂
References 📚
To set up all these rules and write this article I have been influenced by these books that I have read :
