How to Reduce Social Media Addiction.
What do you get out of it?
Reflect on your social media behavior
Stay in control of your social media behavior
Tips and tricks on how to use social media
This self coaching tool is inspired by the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. We as innovators believe that social interaction with technology is generally a positive advancement. It helps people to connect between continents and cultures easily every day. This said, it is important to understand how to use social media while not getting addicted to it. This tool will help you to reflect on your social media behavior and gives you a couple of tricks how you can keep your behaviours where you want them to be.
Seen other Self Coaching Tools we shared?
How does it work?
1. Reflect and Evaluate
Reflecting visually on your behavior is a great way to go from “I think I do something that much and because of that” to “I know I do this and wherefore I do it”.
Before you start reflecting, please do not use any digital help to analyze your behavior right now. This will come later and might harm your outcome. Just start with a good guess.
Take a pen and paper. Hold the paper in landscape and fold it half way from left to right. Unfold the paper and draw 2 circles on each side.
Write morning above the left circle and afternoon above the right circle.
3. Start with marking important activities / situations in your day. This can be different from person to person. Just take things that happen at least 5 days a week. E.g. when do you get up, go to work, have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, go to bed.
4. Take an additional piece of paper, orient it in landscape and start to write down a list of all social media platforms you use.
5. Go back to the other paper and go mentally through your day and write down when you use social media preferably with a different colored pen.
Now you can see which social media platform you use spread out over your day and how this is linked to situations during your day.
6. The next step is using the visual page to build further on the list page. Take the list page and add columns to the list. Write as column headlines TIME, SITUATION, TRIGGER keep a little space on the right side because we will add more columns later on.
7. Write for each social media platform the aggregated time of your day into the time cell. Add the reasons you used the platform in the reasons cell and a possible trigger that brought you to use this specific social media in the trigger cell.
Example situation:
Commune to work/home
Eat breakfast
Lying in bed
Having a coffee break
Relax on the coach
Toilet break
Example triggers:
I got a notification
I didn’t know what to do (was bored)
I wanted to know how much likes I got
I wanted to share a moment via photo, text, video etc.
I always do use it at that time of the day
I answered a message
Now you should have a comprehensive overview of all the social media you use, the times, the situations and the triggers that make you use them.
8. Take both of your papers and take a couple of minutes to look at the totality.
How does this feel?
What do you think?
What might be the reason that I use each of the social media platforms?
9. Calculate the total time of all the separate social media platforms you use over a day and write the sum below the bottom of your time column.
10. Go back to the top and add another column headline that you name FEELING. Row by row look at what you wrote for each social media platform and draw smileys into each row to show if you are happy, sad or natural with this row.
How do you feel about the amount of sad and natural smileys?
What might you want to change?
Are there any patterns you recognize?
2. Analyze and Verify
All what you have done until now is based on your experience and feel for how you use social media. Now you are going to fact check your assumptions with real data.
Use your devices to dig into screen time. Check how much time you spend on social media in total, per day and individually per social media platform.
Most devices and platforms will give you this possibility, just search on the internet to find ways to analyze your screen times for your device.
Take a pen with a different color and add the screen time next to your estimated time.
How far are your estimations from the measured one?
How do you feel about the result?
3. Adjust and Share
Add another column headline that you name GOAL and write into the rows that are marked with a sad smiley, what your goal is to change this smiley into a natural or happy smiley.
Preferably set a goal that you can measure like “I want to use this social media platform maximum 20 minutes per day”.
What is a reasonable time I can use the social media platform?
How could I measure my goal?
Is this goal realistic to achieve?
Add another column headline that you name ACTION and write for each goal actions you will do to achieve your goal.
What can I do to achieve this goal?
How could I keep me accountable?
Who could help me achieve my goal?
Take time with your family and friends to share the exercise you did, what you found out and what your thoughts are about it. Discuss on how they can help you to achieve your goals.
Now it is on you to stay focused and walk step by step into a new life.
Seen your other coaching tools that might help you?
Tips and Tricks from our coaches:
Grey scale:
Our brains love flashy and colorful things. By analyzing our triggers we found out that switching the mobile phone to grayscale helped us to stay away from social media.
Limit your screen time:
Apple as one of the examples has implemented the possibility to schedule down time and app limits across devices. Through programming the maximum time we want to spend on each social media platform we got a great grip on our usage.
Notifications:
One of our triggers we found out was getting notified of incoming social media posts, likes, new photos etc.. Switching the notifications completely off from all the social media feeds on our phones, tablets and laptops gave us a lot of freedom and took out the feeling of urgency to check what news just arrived in our feeds.
Do not disturb:
The next level to switch off notifications. Some of us even programmed our phones to switch off all notifications from 6pm to 8am. And found out that there are better ways to spend time than on our screens.
Why do we recommend it?
Analyzing why and how you are doing certain things will give you a good way to look into your mind.
Staying in control of how you use social media enables you to spend your time and focus effectively.
Leaders are people who are using their social skills in the most effective way. Leading yourself is the first step to lead others.
Any thoughts or experiences on your side? Let us know in the comments at the end of the page.
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