guest post | ibukun akinnawo - don't let social media run your life

This month, I'm focusing on Productivity as part of my year-long Happiness Project. One of my goals this month is to spend less time on social media. I don't think social media is inherently bad, but I do think that lately it has been consuming way too much of my time. I'd find myself checking social media every spare moment I had. I realized that a lot of my social media consumption was totally mindless and a waste of time. So at the beginning of this month, I deleted the Facebook, Twitter, and Bloglovin apps off of my iPhone. I'm not going to lie, I instantly felt disconnected from the world and I was not happy about it! The first few days, I swear I went through withdrawals. But as the weeks have gone by, I have appreciated being unplugged a little bit. The world hasn't ended because I can't check-in, post, comment, and like with wild abandon. It's not only helped me gain some much-needed perspective, but it's also helped with my productivity. Not being glued to my social media sites has freed up my time, my attention, and my ability to focus on other tasks.

I'm not the only one who has felt the need to disengage from social media. Ibukun Akinnawo approached me with an idea for a guest post and it was the perfect fit for this month! Read Ibukun's great tips for using social media right and let us know what you think in the comments!

Image via Death To The Stock Photo
In May this year I was at the end of myself with insecurity and comparison. “Comparison is the thief of joy” never sounded more true. Thankfully, at the time, I read Paul Miller’s story about giving up the internet for a year and in my heart I knew that was what I wanted to do to. Well maybe not give up the internet, but give up the hold I let it have on my happiness. I was sick of wishing my tweets sounded smarter, my pictures were nicer, I had more followers, I had more retweets, my blog was prettier, etc. I was letting social media get to me and wreck me in the worst possible way and I knew I had to do something about it as soon as possible. So I wrote a long post explaining to the friends I’d made off Twitter that I would be giving Twitter up for three weeks because that’s how long they say it takes to break a habit. Three weeks may not sound like a long time to you but for someone like me who logged in to her Twitter (I actually never ever logged out) every single day and was churning out an average of 100 tweets per day 3 weeks seemed like eternity. I prayed to God for strength and I deactivated my account. By the end of my experiment, I was the better for it. I will be sharing with you the ways that I currently keep my social media account from running my life and hope they help you too:

1. Keep yourself occupied: When you are busy living life in real life, you won’t have the time (and maybe even desire) to log on to social media and stay there just endlessly refreshing the page and wishing you had someone else’s life.
2. Log out: You can’t be busy all the days of your life. The days you’re not busy are the days you are most tempted to waste time just mindlessly updating your status, tweeting or just being on the network observing. So on those days, share what you need to then log out. Or turn off push notifications on your cell phone.
3. Schedule: If you’re a blogger, or your job involves social media, there are really helpful apps that do the job for you while you focus on real life. Buffer and Crowdbooster are my go-to networks for scheduling tweets and facebook updates.
4. Live: No, really. This looks like a no-brainer but it needed to be on this list. Don’t just hover around wishing you could somehow get your house to look like the one _____ instagrammed this morning. Focus on making plans to improve yourself and your home if you think your house needs some improvement but remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.
5. Be intentional: Don’t mindlessly share stuff on social media. Think: Do I really need to share this? Think quality instead of quantity when it comes to online life.
6. Do what you need to: If you honestly feel that you still need to step away from social media entirely for a while, don’t overthink it. Set aside that time to not only get away but also sort through issues that you have to deal with. Do what you need to and come away a better person.

The internet is a lovely place and I am more than grateful for the friends I have made on it. I love that the world is right there in my room because of it but I am determined to be alive in real life and not fall back into the pit of comparison, negativity and depression by letting my social networks run my life.

I can’t say I have the last word on this so I’d love to know: what helpful tips do you have on using social media wisely?

Ibukun Akinnawo is a music-major at University of Lagos, Nigeria by day and a writer by night. On the weekends, Ibukun plays contributor at Aphroden. She enjoys tweeting, meaningful conversations, coffee and the people in her life. Ibukun writes about life and faith at 'She is out of control’. She believes in the God who lavishes grace and loves extravagantly.