Using Social Media Without It Using You

The design of these platforms is to be used, and the evidence is that the average person spends hours a day on them and reports afterwards that they did not enjoy it. That is not a willpower failure on your part; it is what the system is built to produce. Anything that only works by resisting a design is not a strategy.

• Turn off every non-human notification. Leave direct messages from actual people. This one change is most of the benefit.
• Remove the apps from your home screen. Reopening deliberately beats being notified.
• Set a time limit in your device settings, and put the app in a folder on the last screen rather than deleting it.
• Unfollow without guilt, including mutuals. The feed is a product of who you follow, and that is fully under your control.
• Follow people, not trends. Following specific people is what makes a feed worth reading.

• Decide before you open what you are there for — talking to people, or publishing. Both are fine; drifting between them is what eats the time.
• Posting works better when it is batched. One session of drafting beats six interruptions.
• For a business account, schedule posts, and reply to comments once a day rather than continuously.
• Anything that makes you feel worse after twenty minutes is not a use of time, whatever the metric says.

Deleting everything cold is the most common advice and usually the worst version of it — you lose the people, and keep the craving. A gentler version works better: keep the accounts, unfollow aggressively, move the apps away, remove notifications, and check in after a month.