Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Buzzfeed, etc are all designed to keep you distracted while stealing your attention. It distracts you from the most important things in your life, work, and relationship and you might end up the whole day browsing through these social media sites without doing any useful work, only to catch yourself by 4 pm finally drained and feeling used.
This feeling of exhaustion will soon go away, and even after motivating yourself to work. You might still find yourself lurking around these social media sites again. It is like a cycle, maybe you are addicted or even obsessed.
After the US presidential election in 2016 that saw Donald Trump emerge as the winner. Cambridge Analytica, a marketing agency was said to have engineered the outcome of the election and could have even influenced Brexit by making use of data from Social media giant, Facebook to change public opinion. This is one of the harmful effects of social media, the fact that someone you don’t know can make use of your data available on these social media platforms to market their product and these ads are sold to you.
How can we even be sure that our decisions are truly ours, or could have been tampered by marketers we don’t even know? Think about all the times you browsed about a topic on Google only to find ads related to that topic following you about on Facebook and Youtube.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and some other related privacy issues on Facebook, there was a movement to #deletefacebook, a lot of prominent figures went ahead to delete the social media from their phones and devices, but what about you who might rely on this social network to connect with old school mate or continue to contribute to a book club? Are you also deleting Facebook or should you continue the social network only to continue getting distracted and having your privacy violated?
Social media vs your priorities
This article is not about deleting all your social media accounts even when they are in fact useful to your work and relationship. This article is about getting your priorities right when using these social networks and putting them in check so it doesn’t affect your life in the form of addiction.
So what do you do?
When you wake up in the morning, it is important to resist the urge to begin pressing your phone immediately. You can start with your devotion if you are a religious person or do a 15 minutes meditation. Then write down the list of activities you want to perform and achieve for the day, this list will serve as a reminder even for the things you want to do for your loved ones. You can also write a list of places you want to go to and persons you want to visit.
Start your day by carrying out these activities, bit by bit. Make sure you have done the most important things in the morning like laundry, cooking, and meditations. This will give you a sense of fulfillment and drive your hunger to complete the other tasks for the day.