Over the past few years I have always struggled with how much content to create and how to share that content with the world. The Internet has been an amazing tool that allows me to reach people with my content all around the world.
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However, like any tool it must be used wisely. As Uncle Ben once said to Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I want to use that tool, but I don’t want to lose my soul in the process.
Recently I came across a video by Dr. Cal Newport entitled, “quit social media.” Newport has many challenging words to say about social media and they are primarily tied to his concept of “deep work.”
Essentially he believes that for most people, social media can easily become a harmful tool that hinders us on multiple levels. It distracts us from our tasks at work and the interactions we have with our family. Newport doesn’t say everyone should throw it out entirely, but he does challenge everyone to evaluate their use of social media and determine if it is helping you or harming you.
In particular, he says that social media can harm our work by constantly vying for our attention. It is all too common for many of us to check social media (or even email) every 5 or 10 minutes and this ultimately hinders our work process. We aren’t able to be fully engaged in a single task and this means the quality of our work suffers.
What he suggests is to evaluate your use of the Internet on a larger level as well as a day-to-day level. By doing so you can determine how much time you are devoting to distracted work versus “deep work.”
What I discovered is that I need to step back from the social media scene and discern if it is worth it or not.
In one aspect, my living is tied to social media (besides writing, I help organizations manage their social media accounts). So obviously I can not quit entirely at this moment in time. However, I believe that I can cut down its usage. My first step will be to put a “hold” on my personal Facebook and Twitter pages. I typically post content to these social media platforms on a daily basis and so this will cut down on some of my distractions.
I am doing this so that I can devote myself to more “deep work,” focusing on writing quality, rather than quantity. My ultimate hope, however, is that I will have more time to write so that I will end up writing more than I did in the first place.
This means that the only place you will find my latest articles will be on my website (and Aleteia.org). I will continue to send out a weekly email with quality content and so if you want to read it, you will need to subscribe to my free newsletter.
Additionally, I have incorporated an RSS feed of my most recent articles from Aleteia on this website (you can click on “latest articles” above to access it). This will make it easier to find my latest content and you can bookmark it and check back daily.
In reality, this concept of “deep work,” isn’t new. The monks of medieval monasticism were experts at it. They would spend days, weeks, months, years on a single task of illuminating a beautiful manuscript. They weren’t always checking their social media accounts and it allowed them to make amazing pieces of art as well as inspiring spiritual classics.
I am going to test this concept out for the next 30 days. For many writers, the thought of silence on social media can be scary. Yet, I have discovered that the majority of traffic that goes to my website comes from Google searches and my email list. At the end of those 30 days, I will make another evaluation and determine how to proceed further.
I look forward to this experiment and invite you to subscribe to my email list as well as check out the video below and Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. I believe it has great potential and can reorient our lives on what matters most.