Can't come to the phone right now, all my apps are blocked

the joys of being MIA

Viva (2007)

If you don’t know what “chronically online” means, allow me to paint you a picture:

Woman in her mid-twenties who has somehow fallen into a career in social media management spends her free time yapping on her personal accounts, watches Youtube videos while she cooks, and listens to podcasts in the shower. When she tries to be present and read a book or have a human interaction, her phone’s humming presence is a painful reminder of all she might be missing out on. The device sings its seductive siren song, pulling her fingers toward it like a magnet until her thumb makes glorious contact with a shiny icon at last.

So this definition may be a little too specific to be worthy of a dictionary placement, but this woman was me about a year ago.

I grew up on the internet and became a part of it very early on. I spent my early teens reblogging photos of In-N-Out burgers perfectly lined up in red trays, black and white The Vampire Diaries GIFs and grainy portraits of a pastel-haired Marina and the Diamonds. I figured out how to add an automatic playlist to my tumblr page so I could force every visitor to jump as M83’s Midnight City screamed through their headphones, and I spent endless weekends taking pictures of outfits that I would upload on Sunday evenings to a blog whose title would inevitably be some kind of wordplay between “style” and “cat”.

To me, being online has always meant creation. I was an uploader, not a downloader. It’s what brought me here in the first place, and it’s still the reason why I log in now. I didn’t come to the internet to have toxic interactions with strangers or to compare my life to someone else’s; I was a relatively happy kid, spending most of my time with friends outside, a hostage to my extracurriculars. Being online never took over my life in an alarming way, but as a creative person, I was happy to participate in a world so full of possibilities.

I didn’t plan on becoming a social media manager, but it happened less than a decade later. It was a gig, and then it was my job. I guess it sort of fell into my lap because I was pretty good at it, the pay was better than writing for magazines (sadly), and I wanted to do something easy that would allow me to focus on other projects. So I started managing social media for brands, first full-time, then as a freelancer.

Being a social media manager seems to be quite a popular job these days, if the number of Youtube videos instructing you on how to get started are any indication. I did it for about six years, and while I’m grateful for what it taught me, I would argue it can become a very special brand of personal hell.

The thing with social media management is that, if you take your job seriously (I did) and want to do it well (I also did), then you kind of end up being online 24/7. Even if you’re casually using your socials in your down time - seeing what your friends are up to, for instance -, your mind will still inevitably be working in some capacity, looking for emerging trends and thinking “oh! This could be a cool idea for client X” when you should be effectively logged out. It may be fun for a while, but if you’re like me, you’ll reach a point where you’re pretty much talking in memes. The constant buzzing of information in your brain becomes so monumental, you can no longer think straight.

Eventually, I got so burned out, so tired of constantly having to pull tricks out of a paper hat just to prove I even deserved my job, that I began watching social media detoxing Youtube videos as a coping mechanism. Going fully offline became my wildest fantasy.

I enjoy being on social media on my own terms, but I was tired of having information shoved down my throat. The human brain wasn’t made to process this much noise, and even chronically online me could recognize that 90% of the information I was gobbling down was:

• Useless sh*t

• Negative and/or distressing in some capacity

• Consumed involuntarily, since it was being fed to me by an algorithm and not chosen by me.

I think we often find ourselves on social media when we aren’t even in the mood to consume anything, because we don’t really look at it that way. Unlike a book or a magazine, which you will pick up only when you very intentionally want to read them, social media has a way of trapping us in a consumption cage. We might log in only to reply to a friend’s DM or post a holiday picture, our brains ready to do that very specific micro activity, and all of a sudden we’ve been doomscrolling for two hours and are now aware that there’s a serial killer in the area, a celebrity couple has broken up, and there’s a new season of Industry out (watch it, it’s really good).

Most of the time, I find myself reading a horrible comment section on Instagram just to end up asking myself how did I even end up here?. I quite literally don’t know any of those people, or care about them.

Eventually, I quit. You don’t really quit as a freelancer - you just finish up your projects and decide to pivot, which is what I did a couple of months ago. It was something I postponed for longer than I should have, because I was worried I wouldn’t be hired to do anything else; it’s what I’ve done for years now, after all. It’s what I know and what the people around me know me for. But I’d been looking for other opportunities as I worked on social media - even then I knew I wanted to start writing again -, and I realized that I had to close that door for the proverbial window to reveal itself. With that expanse of open road before me came the freedom to be offline if I so desired, and after a summer vacation spent mostly MIA, I decided to reduce my access to social media apps in a more permanent way.

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To give you an idea of my consumption patterns before this experiment began, I was most likely tapping on those icons at the very least once every hour, from the moment I woke up to right before I went to sleep. Sometimes I would open my Instagram feed, see there was nothing new and leave, other times something would catch my eye and I would stay engaged for thirty minutes to an hour. It’s easier to convince yourself that this is okay when it is so closely linked to your job - in fact, if you work on social media, you can very well call doomscrolling working (and it is).

After I came back from vacation, I decided to try blocking four apps - Instagram (the main threat, public enemy number one), TikTok, Gmail (I check my email too often) and Substack notes, which is easy to get addicted to as well - for eighteen hours a day. This isn’t a lot, when you think about it - I still had SIX hours a day to roam freely -, but it immediately signaled to me that while I could go wild during that timeframe, for the rest of the time those apps would be completely out of reach. I chose to make my apps accessible to me from 2 pm to 8 pm every day, weekends included.

I used to be more active in the mornings, so I predicted a torturous first day, but I found myself feeling just… relieved. There was silence, a quietness. It was as if there was no longer this cloud hanging over my head, a nagging creature demanding my attention or food about to burn in the oven. My brain immediately understood that it didn’t have to worry about checking in any more, at least not for a couple of hours, and I was able to fully focus on whatever I was doing.

On day two, 2 pm arrived and I thought “Sh*t. Already?”, which amused me. I didn’t want to be online just yet. So I extended the blockage period to twenty hours, and days later to twenty one hours, and I’ve found that my sweet spot is to have three hours of unblocked apps a day - in my case, from 4 pm to 7 pm. It’s not that I use those three hours to their fullest either, even though I could; instead, this window allows me to log in at any time between four and seven, which is usually when I post anyway, if I choose to post. Sometimes I stay for an hour, sometimes I’m out after ten minutes. It gives me enough time to reply to my messages, share whatever I want to share and see what people are up to. That’s all I need.

I’ve had my apps blocked for about two months now. Here are a couple of interesting things I’ve noticed since:

• I’m more intentional with my consumption of social media now. I know my time is limited, so I usually go in with a mission - to reply to people, post something or check in on someone in particular. I don’t doomscroll nearly as much now, though I still spend my thirty minutes on TikTok every now and again.

• Focusing on my tasks is a lot easier. It’s like I’ve freed up part of my brain.

• I have more free time! Without those distractions, I can think of what I want to do next. I’ve been reading more, walking more, probably sleeping more too.

• My approach to content creation went from seeking inspiration online, to spending quiet time with myself and my ideas offline. It’s more about what excites me and less about what is working for other people or myself (I don’t really check my analytics anymore).

• I stopped spending time in comment sections that aren’t my own. I was never a commenter, but I can be a mindless lurker (I’m nosy!) and that habit filled my brain with toxic, useless information.

If you feel like you need to create some boundaries when it comes to your social media consumption, but don’t want to (or can’t) go cold turkey and delete them all permanently, I highly recommend doing something like this, even if it’s only for a week, and seeing how it feels. You can always adjust as you go.

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💌 The following section features some tips in case you want to give this a try 💌

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There are two key tips to implementing this:

Honor your word: I knew no one would be looking over my shoulder or forcing me to implement this, so I had to decide that I would never unblock my apps before 4 pm. Because if you do it once, it’s a slippery slope. If I’m writing a DM when they get blocked again, I’ll finish it tomorrow. If I’m watching a TikTok video and it gets interrupted, buh-bye, it’s gone.

Timeframe vs total duration: Create a timeframe for your apps to be available to you (i.e. 2 pm - 6 pm) instead of having them blocked after you’ve used them for a specific amount of time (i.e. blocked after three total hours of usage). While that method might be beneficial too, I think it still leaves a lot of space for you to be distracted by the apps throughout the day, spending five or ten minutes here and there.

If you like the idea of this but it sounds too extreme for you…

Start by muting your notifications. I had my notifications on mute long before I blocked my apps, and even just that can make a huge difference. But, beware, it can also backfire, if you’re so worried about the notifications you’re missing that you begin checking on your phone even more often.

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FAQ

What app do you use?

I use an app called AppBlock. I have no idea if it’s the best one, but it’s free.

What if I have important group chats I need to keep up with?

Unless they are work-related or truly urgent chats that demand your immediate attention, I promise people won’t care if you take 24 hours to get back to them! If they are time sensitive, consider moving them to a different app (like Whatsapp, Slack or Telegram, for instance) if possible.

How do you deal with the boredom that comes with having your socials blocked?

If I find myself with time on my hands and no apps available, I will usually have a book with me because that’s just what I’m used to doing (never, and I can’t stress this enough, leave the house without a book or e-reader! Blocked apps or otherwise). But if there’s no book available for some reason, I will:

• Listen to an audiobook (shoutout to libro.fm!). I always have at least one downloaded on my phone.

• Resort to the notes app. You can start a list of your favorite movies, plan a trip, write a poem… there’s so much that can be done in the notes app.

• Text or call a friend.

• Embrace boredom and just be bored. It’s not so bad. I know this one’s easy if you’re waiting in line for five minutes, but a nightmare if you have an hour to get through. If it’s five or ten minutes, consider simply being bored. Look around you. Read the flu shot poster. Talk to that old lady. People-watch.

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Have additional questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments 💬

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