Do you feel like you should be Tweeting right now as you read this? Are you concerned that you haven’t written a blog post in the past 2 days? Is your to-do list growing with social media tasks such as ensuring your delicious tags are correct? Is your left hand frozen in the CTRL R position so even though Facebook live updates you feel you are getting the newest updates? Have you ever spent the first hour of your saturday morning in the nebulous state between dream and awake thinking you are sending @replies only to realize that you are, in fact, still in bed? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ll bet someone is going to read this and say “I’ve been there.”
We all have a lot of things going on in our lives. Personal things and work things or all shapes and sizes. We have laundry to do, dishes, quality time with our loved ones but now we also have a social media world to pay attention to as well. I know somedays I wake up and if just one more item creeps into my task list I might lose my mind but then I start to think…how much time and effort do I really need to put into the social media world? Is it really a huge deal if I miss something?
Last night I went out to dinner and left my iPhone at home…on purpose. Can you believe it? Do you know what happened? The world went on. It’s important to remember that these are just tools. That’s all. What’s important in all of this are the relationships that are built and the knowledge that is acquired in the process but if the only thing you learn is about the tool itself then you’re going to make yourself crazy. It’s simply not possible to keep up with every new social network and it doesn’t have to be perfect.
So on behalf of myself and all those like me who have at some point suffered from social media anxiety, I hereby give you permission to unplug, take a day off and give yourself the freedom to just say “Screw it, time to unplug!”
UPDATE: I found a really good post from the Good Experience blog called About letting go of digital distractions that seemed like a relevant addition to this post.
Link to Article: http://goodexperience.com/2009/07/about-letting-go-of-d.php