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How and Why I Minimized Social Media Use

Anna Riley
3 min readMar 7, 2023

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Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Though social media has benefits, cutting back on its usage wasn’t a huge deal, except that it took a while and some commitment.

I minimized using it because I wanted more time for other things and felt my social media usage could be modified. The process took a couple of years, with Facebook being the first platform to adjust. Gradually, my posts have been mostly limited to occasional family events, my Medium story links, and checking on birthdays.

Even though managing time was my main concern in trimming tech usage, less strain on the body from sitting in front of a computer, holding a phone, or moving a mouse was another advantage. So it helped with Tech Neck, also.

After a while, other platforms were streamlined too.

The following change was with Instagram. I had been using Instagram for some time and posting many things (oddly, many began with an ‘f’) like family, friends, flowers, favorite products, food — fun stuff! Over a few months, I made fewer posts than usual and shared an occasional story. Stories are easy enough to post and can be found in Archive if I want to reference. It’s a way for me to save info.

Twitter’s turn was next. Initially, I was an avid tweeter with almost every TV show I watched. Both tweeting and watching some of the shows now lessened. I check a few notifications every couple of days, make an occasional tweet or retweet, and share my Medium story link. Twitter took me the longest to break away from, probably because of the ties to TV.

For Direct Messages (on any platform), with close family and friends, various reels or info shared are generally fun. The trick is to limit how often the messages are used and checked. One to two times a day is my guideline. Being faithful to this rule is crucial because checking and re-checking messages is an effortless habit but can waste plenty of time too.

Photo by LJ Lara on Unsplash

With all my social media minimizing, FOMO was a problem initially, but I’ve gotten over that.

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Anna Riley
Anna Riley

Written by Anna Riley

* Proud Mom of two daughters * Grandmother to an adorable toddler girl * Ageless spirit * Still learning in my sixtes * Personal blog in the works!

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