5 Proven Tricks for Spending Less Time on Social Media and More Time Reading Books
Social media (SoMed) is beneficial: for learning, networking, and promoting your ideas. However, spending an inordinate amount of time on the networks just consuming content and scrolling up and down wastes your time (and perhaps your life) and makes you generally unproductive.
Reading good books trumps all the benefits of social media and offers you much more. From books, you get great ideas for living and for becoming better at whatever you do.
Personally, I find reading to be therapeutic. It has also been found that reading books cures — (no, I am not referring to ignorance, of course, it cures that too well) — but I am referring to depression and other bad raps often associated with too much social media. So, it makes sense to spend far more time on books.
Here are 5 proven strategies I use to save time off social media for — not just books — but other more important things in life.
1. Approach life with a productivity mindset.
When you make productivity (added value to your life per minute) your priority, you would have installed an internal compass that directs you to what to spend more time on. Apparently, reading books is more productive than swiping right or left and scrolling up and down social media pages.
2. Set a daily reading goal, and make opening SoMed a reward for achieving such a goal.
Goals drive actions. Unless you are among those who use SoMed as a primary vehicle for business or those who make money managing other people’s SoMed, spending up to 2 hours a day on SoMed indicates that your reading is taking a hit.
Make a commitment to achieve a set daily goal in reading before opening those addictive Apps. I make opening SoMed a reward for having read/listened to a specific number of pages or chapters of a book. Until I achieve my daily reading goal, I don’t (in fact, I can’t) answer Mark Zuckerberg’s call. I do this using App blockers. I won’t name any here; just Google, and you will find them. Set the time to lock out social media Apps every day and then stay focused.
3. Turn off notifications on all your social media accounts.
Don’t let Mark remote-control you and dictate when you open his Apps. Put yourself in control of when you come on and off SoMed. Now, I want you to stop reading.
Go to your phone settings, click the notification and check off notifications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, TikTok — all of them. Now, move the Apps off your phone’s homepage and rearrange them such that it takes some effort to get to them on your phone.
Out of sight is out of mind. Social media is designed to get you hooked on the platform. That is why they would notify you about every unnecessary thing, just to bring you back on. This is how they make money. Conversely, this is how you lose your time, and if care isn’t taken, how you lose your life.
Reading books is the complete opposite. The more time you spend buried in the pages and making engaging notes, the better you become in character, in knowledge, in communication, at work and I dare say, in life generally. Choose wisely.
4. Have a ‘no social media’ day or days in a week.
Mine are Mondays and Thursdays. These are days that I don’t touch purely social Apps: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I don’t use TikTok and all the others at all. To make this benefit and strengthen my reading muscles, I invented what I called ‘Bookworm Days.’
These are days I read for longer hours, a minimum of 5 hours depending on my calendar. These are Mondays and Thursdays, and as you can see, I chose them to coincide with my ‘no social media’ days. To take me off the noise on social media these days, I set my App blocker to block all social media apps on these two days.
5. Have an accountability partner or partners.
This could be anyone: your friend, family member, or colleague who aims to read more and ‘socialize less’ just like you. Both of you would look out for and help each other stay disciplined and on course. It helps if you are near the person, but it doesn’t matter.
It is also important that both of you are spending (or agree to spend) fairly the same amount of time reading. My wife and I used to be accountability partners to each other, but since her business requires a longer presence on Instagram (by the way, please check out her page — @valuenclassy, and patronize her), it wouldn’t make sense to use Apple to analyze Oranges, so I had to look for a new partner.
Here is the summary of the 5 tricks.
1. Approach life with a productivity mindset.
2. Have a daily reading goal
3. Turn off notifications on all your social media accounts.
4. Have a ‘no social media day.’
5. Get an accountability partner
Conclusion
Just like any technology, social media is neutral. Its effects on us depend on how we use it. Everyone in the world agrees that the lesser time someone spends on personal social media pages, the better the person’s overall productivity and health. Books, on the other hand, are proportional in effect. The more time we spend reading, the better the effects on our lives.
Over the years, these two have been competing for our time. Although reading books is more helpful to us overall, the addictive effect of social media makes some people gravitate more towards it. Social media is like junk food. We know that too much of it is bad for our health, but the taste keeps us ordering more.
As wise people, there comes a time when we have to make a conscious decision to prioritize our health over our taste buds. In a world where everyone lives on the street of social media, and everything goes on therein, this is by no mean an easy decision, but we can try.
