Don’t Let Social Media Run Your Life

This is something I wrote back in 2016. So, it’s been a while since I’ve even looked at it.

I’ll just put it up and make a book recommendation. Well, two recommendations, actually. 🙂

In the last few years, I’ve been on a mission of sorts: to gain a better understanding about how to use social media. I’ve been trying to figure out how to best use social media so that I get results without letting it run my life.

Lately, my life has been one long experiment in trying to master various types of social media. In doing so, it would seem that I’m going about this all wrong. I offer the following insights in the hope that it will help keep social media from running your life.

Trying new and better social media isn’t going to assure you of being successful at your career. Everything I’ve read about mastering Facebook, thriving with Twitter, gaining followers on Instagram, using Tumblr for … God knows what reason, how to create awesome pins for your Pinterest boards that will remain in perpetuity for all to browse-it’s all a bit of a blur to me.

In fact, I’m reading a book right now that suggests that, in order to maintain value in a knowledge-based economy (as ours is in the Internet age), we should be picking and choosing our social media tools carefully. For that is exactly what they should be-tools, not time wasters or mandatory forums that will assure success in all our endeavors. Worse yet, if you choose too many or choose unwisely, you’ll end up caught in a time-sucking loop of shallow encounters that’ll get you nowhere fast.

The book, which is called Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World suggests, among other things, that if you’re on multiple social media, disengage from one or two of them (without shutting your account down) for at least 30 days. If you discover after the time limit that you’ve lost an identifiable benefit from no longer engaging in that social medium, then go back to it. If you can’t identify a benefit, feel free to shut it down. Because what’s the point of using it?

*****

Now, you’d think I would have learned something over the past seven years (well, more like six and a half, actually), but here’s what I’ve been reading …

I suggest that everyone read this book!

I’ll no doubt be reviewing this one in more detail here, as well as here! 🙂

As for social media, I’m caring less and less about the whole topic …

But this video from Stage 32 interested me. 🙂

PS: Repeat after me: AI is simply a tool writers can use, like Final Draft or Scrivener or Word or WordPress or any other computer program. Short of an actual collaboration among humans, there is no scenario in which the software developers of these tools would be entitled to claim copyrights to the work created by using them.

Only humans can hold copyrights. And only creations that involve human oversight can be copyrighted.

Unless the law’s changed within the last week or so. 🙂 Right …

PPS: Would you lot do us a great big favor? Keep your mitts off of this one! 🙂

Originally published at http://randomandsundrythings.wordpress.com on March 31, 2023.