Social Media Detox Update: Over Half Way!
Well we are past the halfway point / almost at the end of week 3 but we’ve been so busy that there hasn’t been an opportunity to write an update until now.
Traveling without Social Media
Traveling while on this detox journey has been great for the most part. It’s been a little weird to not look up restaurants on Instagram or search for family activities via Facebook, etc. but I’m not sure where I would’ve found spare moments to disassociate into a scrolling rabbit hole anyway.
Social Media Withdrawals as a Small Business Owner
Around the beginning of week 2 is when I started to get really twitchy about not being on Instagram as a business owner. I was trying to map out some spring launches and struggling to find info about previous collections because I realized I relied on Instagram as kind of a digital diary for dates and timelines etc for past launches. I don’t typically hash out my launch planning on a calendar, it’s more of a plan all inside my head lol. So I did make the decision to log into my biz Instagram account just on my laptop for the purpose of digging back into the spring launches of years past to help me devise plans for this year.
I’ve logged in about 4 times on the laptop and it’s evident that I can be sucked into the scroll easily so I’ve tried to be super mindful of my purpose in opening that tab and getting in and out as quickly as possible.
There was also a lot of anxiety in the first two weeks about how slow sales have been in February and I think logging in just to see I hadn’t abandoned any customers in DMs helped calm my nerves. Happy to report that as the month continues, sales have picked up a bit since the earlier part of February. Still not stellar but not as severe as they were looking early on.
One day I actually received an email from a sweet repeat customer who wanted to share pics of her daughter wearing a G&G bow for the daddy daughter dance that night and she’d noticed I was taking a social media break so she said she figured she’d send an email. That made my day!! I love staying connected with customers and seeing how they incorporate their bows. The fact that she took the time to send an email was just extra special.
Screen Time Reports
From pre-challenge week to the end of week of 1, my average daily screen time went down 21 percent.
From week 1 to the week 2, my average daily screen time went down again, this time by 27 percent!
We aren’t quite done with week 3 so I don’t have a complete screen time report yet but it’s looking like I’ll have cut my screen time down from the pre-challenge week by half which is wild to think about (although I do wonder how much of this is due to how busy we are on the trip… week 4’s report will be an interesting one to see if phone time climbs back up.)