What can you quit today? I'm taking a break from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+

Oct 12, 2013 · 2 minute read · Comments
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Tonight, I officially announced through my accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ that I was leaving social media for a while.

Reasons?

Right now, I don’t feel like explaining in detail all the many reasons.

The reason for leaving is not just one isolated event, although blocks of certain series of events and actions on Twitter have been particularly discouraging to me.

The most recent seed for quitting actually came just a couple of days ago, from a blog I follow, where I was challenged to ask myself, “what can you quit today?”:

The idea, of course, is that we’re all doing things we don’t need to be doing. Things that zap our energy and passion and crowd our lives so much that we can’t do the amazing things we should be putting all our passions into.

One of the many thoughts I had was that my blogs have been stagnant for quite some time now. There is a clear inverse relationship between my participating on Twitter and Facebook (I never did do much on Google+) and my writing long form articles. So I am going to return to regular blogging.

RSS

In the past, whenever I published a blog post, I would post a link to the social networks I’m on. Well, as part of my experiment, I am going to stop that. I realize that this means many fewer people will keep up with my blog. I have had people tell me that they don’t use RSS feeds any more. I would like to encourage them to get back to RSS so that they can receive updates on blogs such as mine.

And I am fine with having fewer regular readers. It turns out that most feedback I get on my blog is from people who don’t actually regularly follow it anyway, but find something useful from its archives because a Web search led them to my blog. So I feel no need to be timely. Enough people are doing that. I will try more to be timeless instead.

Conclusion

I cannot exaggerate how beneficial I have found social media to be since I got involved two years ago. But there have been severe down sides as well. Meanwhile, I will experiment with taking a break from my biggest sources of distraction and alienation.