Author’s note, October 2026: I wrote this years ago, back when Twitter was still Twitter and my kids were small enough to potty train.
I didn’t quit social media. I run an Instagram account, and I’m on LinkedIn most days. What changed is where my best writing lives. It doesn’t go into a feed that disappears by Thursday. It goes on my blog, my Substack, and into my books, where it keeps working for me long after I press publish.
The original is below, mostly untouched. My update is at the end.
Do you feel the pull?
When you fire up your phone just to “check” whether anything new is on Facebook.
When you’re bored with that, you switch to Instagram. When perfectly curated photographs get old, you cue up Twitter (now X). Before you know it, you forgot why you even opened your browser.
Like walking into a room and wondering what brought you there in the first place.
The pull I’m talking about is that nagging feeling you might be wasting time — your time.
More than money, more than fast cars, your time is your most valuable asset, and the one you can control most.
Social media is a boredom cure, bathroom buddy (oh, c’mon, you know you do), and creativity killer.
A few weeks back, I realized I didn’t like who I was when I was scrolling and scrolling, when I had better things to do and people I loved who wanted my attention.
I took a Facebook-free weekend and learned a lot about myself and the people around me.
Monday morning, though, I was back at it.
Like a dieter who was binging on chocolate cake. Standing up. At the kitchen counter.
Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. LinkedIn.
I set up little games with myself as I worked on my book. Write for 30 minutes, then reward myself with a Facebook break.
I was bored.
When I realized I was scrolling through pages and pages of updates without actually even reading anything, I knew something had to give.
Then an article about how many hours people waste on social media landed in my inbox, and out of curiosity, I whipped out my calculator to see how much time I’d spend on social media by the time I was 100.
For simplicity's sake, I estimated spending an hour a day on the drip.
If I’ve been on social media since 2007 and I spend an hour a day until I’m 100, that’s 73 years.
365 hours a year on social media, 26,645 hours of my life. That’s 3.03 years.
THREE. YEARS.
I thought about what I could accomplish with three years.
I could write a dozen books, a hundred blog posts, potty train a stubborn child, teach someone to read, master a language, or read 50 books.
Three freaking years.
Let that sink in.
Once I quantified this, I uninstalled Twitter from my phone. The next day I uninstalled Instagram.
I don’t have plans to quit Facebook anytime soon. It’s a tool that helps me set up real-life things — with real people. I feel good about it, so it’s valuable to me, and I mostly like the person I am when using it.
But…if I spend an hour a day on Facebook, that’s still three years of my life that are gone by the time I’m 100. That’s a lot of time and way more than I’m willing to donate to the scrolling time-wasting gods.
Even if I limit Facebook to 15 minutes a day, that’s still a big part of my life. Math whizzes, feel free to do the calculation for me. I'm done with math for the day.
For now, I feel good about 15 minutes a day. Not sure yet how I’ll do it — keep a timer? I'm not into being super-strict and rigid — too fussy for me.
Being mindful of how I'm spending my time is the first step.
Update: the math, ten years later
No one ever did the math for me, so I finally did it myself. Fifteen minutes a day, every day, until I’m 100, adds up to about nine months of my life. Nine months! You can grow a whole human in that time.
And most of us aren’t at fifteen minutes. The average person now spends about 2 hours and 21 minutes a day on social media, according to DataReportal. That’s nearly two months of waking hours, every single year.
I’m not here to tell you to delete your apps. Social media is how many of us find clients, and it’s how I’ve met and stay in touch with some of my favorite people.
But here’s what I wish I’d known then. The scrolling was never the real problem. The problem was that my words lived in a place that forgets them… in hours or days. A blog post can still bring someone to you five years later.
A caption? It’s gone by the weekend.
So if you’re going to spend the time writing anyway, put some of it somewhere that lasts.
Want your writing to work harder than a caption
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