Unsocial Sundays¶

This Sunday ignore your social media and streaming apps. Attend to nothing that pushes you information or streams you visual content. You’ll thank me!

The Bedtime Ramblings Social Media Streaming Focus

Simon Harper

01 Feb 2023

3 min read

I was brought up in the 70s when TV was the height of modernism, TV Dinners were nutritionally balanced science, Arctic roll was cosmopolitan (it still is manna from heaven), and smoking was good for your lungs.

So TV has been a constant presence, nay addiction, across my life (as has Arctic Roll, but that’s another story!). Now 10 years ago I wanted to be more intentional, so I changed all my viewing habits to be only things I’d actively picked to watch online, including YouTube, etc. As the net evolved I adopted social media too, and as you can imagine being present on social media and streaming all the time was not the best plan.

Everything ‘they’ say is correct, we need to be intentional, we need to have boring times so the ideas come, we need to be present with the people we are physically ‘with’, we need to not be so bothered about getting back to the screen, and we definitely need to stop multitasking the local and the online worlds (multitasking is a just a term for doing many things badly, IMO).

To my credit, I did realise having social media all the time on my mobile was a bad idea so I dumped all social from my mobile excluding YouTube and the streamers. But still, I was too unfocused, so I decided that I’d try and have no screen time on Sundays - just to try it - and I was pretty freaked out to start with.

Tip

I allowed podcasts (this doesn’t need to take all your attention and is more like the radio), likewise for music, and for reading. But nothing that was pushing me notifications to grab and hold my attention with unintentional/accidental content.

And the results I have to say were excellent, I felt much less anxious about missing stuff online, or missing texts that can wait, I was much more present (I feel) in-the-moment, and I had some good ideas and relaxing reads. I will be continuing, and I suggest you have a go too!

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