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Social Media Realignment Experiment 2.0
The first step in dealing with any addiction is to recognize that you have a problem. So…
“Hi, my name is Judy, and I’m addicted to social media.”
Social media and I have weird relationship, and yes, addiction is part of that. I’m obsessed with understanding how security works on the platforms, but the moment I’m in there…
“Oh, look… Some useless post about red carpet fashion disasters… or the latest chaos among the British royal family… or how the children of stars look like their parents.”
I’m a sucker for the meaningless and boring… and there just went my precious writing time.
Back in July 2020, I posted about the Social Media Realignment Experiment. It was an attempt to realign my social media usage to my professional goals. Quitting all social media wasn’t an option for me, but my everyday usage was out of control.
However, in the original experiment, I was too vague on what I wanted to achieve. So, it’s time to kick the Social Media Realignment Experiment into Version 2.0.
Eulogy for My Mother
It came out of nowhere. There was no warning that something would happen. To top matters off, it was a rare side effect to a standard practice of treatment.
Yet, my world was flipped upside down in a matter of hours.
On Monday 21st September, 2020 at 6:12 pm, I received an odd text message from my father, stating that my mother had a heart attack and was in transit to Christchurch Hospital. It came through on my smartwatch while I was on the toilet. Let’s just say that it was the fastest pee-wipe-and-flush that I have ever done in my life.
(I don’t think I’ll ever understand why he didn’t just phone, but that doesn’t matter now.)
I’m going to rush past the chaos that happened that night, because it too doesn’t matter at this moment. What does matter is that late on Monday evening, my mother developed a brain bleed as a result of a medication that she was given prior to transport to Christchurch. She had a stroke and slipped into a coma.
On Wednesday 23rd September, 2020 at 1:58pm, she was pronounced brain dead.
I have made so many notes about what happened, trying to reason it all in my head. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully reason it. But I try.
What follows is the eulogy that I had read out at my mother’s memorial service the following week.
My daughter hates my Instagram
So, I have been informed on multiple occasions that my daughter hates my Instagram feed. And what she hates about it: all the sunrise photos.
As far as she’s concerned, I post way too many sunrise photos. She’s never really explained to me what she thinks I should post instead, but apparently, my feed is filled with too much sunshine.
But only yesterday I got the following message from one of my friends.
“I enjoy seeing your sunrise photos. It’s nice to put a bit of colour in the day – especially with how crazy things are at the moment.”
And this is not the only comment that I have gotten about my sunrise photos. It would appear that many people enjoy my feed because of all the sunrise photos.
So, my daughter thinks my feed is filled with too much sunshine, whereas other people love seeing all that color in a crazy world. What is a girl to do—expect laugh!
US Law and Cellphones
I will admit that I have a morbid interest in crime. My brain is happy to think about what nasty things that bad guys can get up to. As a fiction writer, that is not only going to be bad, it’s going to lean towards pure evil—then take it one step further.
My stories are primarily set in the US, which means I have to spend a significant amount of time getting my head around various aspects of US law and police procedures. With there being differences between federal, state, and country (sometimes even city), it can seriously do the head in.
But the joys of being a fiction writer, I only need to be plausible. Not everything I read about US law will make its way into one of my manuscripts, but some readers might be interested in learning about the technological aspects of US law that I uncovered.
Today, it’s the little quirk associated with looking at an arrestee’s smartphone.
The Social Media Realignment Experiment: Update
Back in July, I decided that I needed to do something about my out-of-control habits on social media. I was spending far too much time wasting the day away on something that had little importance on my daily life.
While social media has been my lifeline to the outside world for years, I’ve realized how toxic that environment has become. And with everything else going on in the world, for the sake of my mental sanity, something needed to be done.
So, I set out on a mission to realign my social media habits with my goals and aspirations—and it has been a struggle.
The Social Media Realignment Experiment
As part of my daily routine, I track how much time I spend on various tasks. I keep a note of the time I start a particular task and the time I finish. At different points throughout the day, normally when I take a break, I enter my notes into a spreadsheet that calculates the exact time I’ve spent on different tasks and tallies it up across the day, the week, the month, or any other time frame I want.
I will admit that it is a fancy spreadsheet system that I developed, but it works for me.
One task I track is how much time I spend on social media. Being the person who I am, trying to understand the dangers associated with social media and online activities, I need to spend some time on social media. But I am not immune to the time-suck that can occur.
In tracking my social media habits, there have been times when I have whittled away the entire day on social media. In the last month alone, I’ve spent 24 hours on social media and reading blogs. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s approximately one hour per day spent scrolling through the feeds. Yes, it is not 100% doing nothing, as some of it is interacting with writers under my editor’s hat, providing advice and building those valuable connections, but it is an hour a day that I could have been writing.
It is time for me to do a reassessment of my social media platform and to reevaluate exactly how much of that time I spend on social media and what I do while I’m there. Time to bring things back into alignment with my goals as a writer and editor.