Thoughts On Life With Limited Electronic Usage

(Photo courtesy of: google.com)

• It has been almost a month without Instagram or Facebook in my life, and while I would definitely say I miss certain aspects of Instagram I do not miss Facebook at all.
•  I feel so much lighter than I have a in a while. I guess I never realize the invisible baggage that came along with being a part of social media. 
• Apple came out with a feature to keep track of a person's weekly average usage for their products. I began using it to help me see how much time I was spending on my phone. In the beginning I was on my phone for a whopping 1 hour and 43 minutes. (Awful, I know.) I have worked my way down to 18 minutes a day. (Last week I had popped up to 25 minutes though, so managing my time will be something I need to constantly be aware of.) My goal is to get down to 15 minutes a day. I use my phone to text, talk, and check my email. That is it. I only check my email once a day. 
• It's funny because now that I have pulled away from Facebook and Instagram I have lost interest in other electronics as well. I am on the computer to look up addresses to mail my letters, to use google-maps to write down directions,  and also to blog - which I don't do with any regularity any more, so you can see how much time I spend on-line. I stopped checking People.com or Usmagazine.com and all of the other websites I would check on-line. I just get on the computer do my business and then get off. No extra time spent perusing this or that. 
• I stopped watching television for the most part as well. A lot of this has to do with the headaches I have been getting with some regularity every time I watch TV. (I went to the eye doctor last winter and my prescription did not change, so it's not my eyes.) I hate getting headaches, so if I have to avoid watching television to not get one I am more than willing to do so. Last night we watched a family movie - we had the audio descriptive feature on so that Sarah could understand what was happening. It was awesome because I was able to do some chores in the kitchen while listening to the movie. I was still able to participate in what the family was doing sans the headache the next day. It was a really cool feature that I will probably utilize for every movie we watch that offers it. It will allow me to watch the movie without really watching it - if that makes sense. 
• I have thought about subscribing to a newspaper to get my news because I used the internet to have a tiny grasp on what was going on in this world, but I haven't subscribed to anything yet. 
• The break has been really nice and refreshing. For some reason, social media is really toxic for me. I wish I was better at being able to manage it, but I am just not.
• I could see myself picking Instagram back up at some point. There are some people that I follow that I find really, really inspirational. I just don't trust myself to go back on quite yet and not pick up all of my old, bad habits. I was thinking about unfollowing everyone, but two or three people in order to avoid the temptation of spending too much time checking everyone else's posts out, but I am not at the point yet. The benefits of being off of Instagram outweigh the cons of missing those inspiring posts. I am sure the pendulum will swing in the other direction at some point though. 
• It's amazing how much more I can get done in a day when I am not on electronics. For a long time I have felt like I could really use a few extra hours in my day when really all I needed was the ability to use the 24 hours given in a better way.