What happened when I stopped using LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp for a month.

Results: I learned about my focus, my priorities, my life, and myself.

Your focus is a scarce asset.

—Thibaut Meurisse

If I start with honesty, the headline of this post will be “What happened when I stopped using LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp for a month ten days.”

It’s because those ten days felt like over a whole month. I was craving to check my LinkedIn DMs. How many likes and comments did my last post get? And see others’ stories and posts on Instagram. I was scratching myself, thinking if someone had texted me on WhatsApp. What if I miss something important on Twitter?

Without thinking much, I deactivated these social apps and decided to spend a month without them, which didn’t happen, as I quit in ten days. But in those few days, I realised something about my focus, my priorities, my life, and myself.

Let’s read further and know what happened in those ten days.

Found on Unsplash

Those ten days taught me a lot about my focus and myself.

It was hard to delete Instagram. It was even harder to delete WhatsApp. LinkedIn was impossible. I made it possible. I deleted all of them at once.

On the first day, I reinstalled Instagram and was about to log in, but something unexpected came up. I had to go to the shop to buy some vegetables. When I rechecked it, I thought that going to the shop was a sign. I uninstalled it again.

Then, I decided to focus on writing articles. I opened my laptop and started writing. I wrote a paragraph, but suddenly I had a thought about what’s happening on LinkedIn and went to check it out, but it was logged out. I was too lazy to log in again but fast enough to open Netflix.

Yes, I opened Netflix and started watching Wednesday season 2. It was released that day only, and as I am obsessed with Wednesday Addams so much that I couldn’t resist myself from binging the whole season all at once. I didn’t stop.

Next came Squid Game. I binged half of the season at once. Worse happened when I continued watching further after dinner, sacrificing my sleep. I stayed up till 3 AM. I didn’t sleep until the whole season was completed. I felt bad when I woke up. I uninstalled Netflix, then reinstalled it. I was being a shit.

It’s the second day since the day I stopped using all the social apps, and yet it wasn’t helping me focus on things that matters. I was ashamed of myself. I was pissed off. I wanted to kick my butt hard, but I couldn’t. Damn!

Fast forwarding to the day I restarted using them.

Those days are the worst days for me. I was binge-watching, doing things that didn’t matter, and was pissed off. I came to realise after ten days that this is not me. I was good when I was writing and sharing it with the world. I was good when I was reading others’ content online. I logged in.

I logged into LinkedIn and checked what had happened. It felt nice reading posts from others. It felt nice checking and responding to them. It felt nice to write a post saying I am back to my fellow readers. I was at peace.

You need ten days to realise what’s good for you.

I felt good when I started writing articles again. I wasn’t worried about what was happening on LinkedIn because I was regularly checking it. It doesn’t mean those ten days didn’t help. It helped me know what not to do.

As you read and see, I didn’t mention Instagram, Twitter, or WhatsApp above. It’s because they are not useful to me now.

Yeah, at first, Instagram caught me. I don’t need WhatsApp because I don’t need it; my friends and family prefer calling me, and others can reach out to me through email. And Twitter wasn’t made for me from the start.

I was worried about what was useful to me. It was LinkedIn and my articles.

You can try this 10-day hack to know what is useful to you and what is not. It’s to realise that:

• Can you miss those text messages that you were responding to just for the sake of it?

• Can you stop scrolling your feed because you scroll it every day for nothing?

• Can you give yourself a chance to use what’s actually useful to you?

Signing off with a few more words:

You don’t have to stop using Instagram or any other social app because others are also not using it. If it is useful to you, you should definitely keep using it.

Your friend,

Sumit,
Curator of Simple Digest

P.S. The fun part: Substack was always there in the first place :)

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