Best tips for using social media

First, I try to open a media site only when I have need to post or respond.

I don’t open it because I’m bored or have a spare moment. Those spare moments are reserved for staring at walls, which is infinitely more useful.

This is to say, I try to treat social media like work. I go to it once in the morning, once in the early afternoon, and once in the evening to put out content that I think will help someone or to engage with someone who is responding in a healthy way.

Second, I avoid unplanned scrolling.

Unplanned scrolling usually means I’m hungry for something to catch my eye—and plenty of strange, dark, and bizarre things are happy to catch the eye on social media.

Planned scrolling can be very different. If you carefully curate what is in your feed and when you will scroll, the dynamic radically shifts.

But in general, I believe we should be wary of the flicking thumb notion. The restless thumb often correlates to the restless heart.

Third, I turn off notifications.

There is no good reason I (or any human being) needs to know in real time who is liking my posts when and how much. There are some useful purposes for these stats, but not as an every-moment affair.

Fourth, I don’t use social media in bed.

Beds are most useful for rest and sex (and sometimes reading a book).

Social media is many things, but it is not a place of rest and should not be a place of sex—even though there are colossal temptations to use it for both.

Mixing social media and bed tempts me to confuse these lines and there is an easy way out of this unfair fight: throw the phone out of the bed.

Fifth, when I come across mean things said about me or someone I love, I employ the timeliness strategy of any veteran parent: ignore the temper tantrum. 

Words are not nearly as useful as silence. Social media is a useful medium for some things but anger is not one of them.

From "The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose For An Age of Distraction," by Justin Early, published by InterVarsity Press