This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits and we’ve been returning to this daily-habit theme periodically since.

The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine. In the spring, these habit episodes have focused on productivity, and I’ve got another such productivity habit for you today.

To provide some context on the impetus behind this week’s habit, I’ve got a quote for you from the author Robert Greene, specifically from his book, Mastery: "The human that depended on focused attention for its survival now becomes the distracted scanning animal, unable to think in depth, yet unable to depend on instincts."

This suboptimal state of affairs — where our minds are endlessly flitting between stimuli — is exemplified by countless digital distractions we encounter every day, but none is quite as pernicious as the distraction brought to us by social media platforms. When using free social media platforms, you are typically the product — a product being sold to in-platform advertisers. Thus, to maximize ad revenue, these platforms are engineered to keep you seeking cheap, typically unsatisfying dopamine hits within them for as long as they can.

This state of affairs is good for social media platforms, but it is typically unhelpful to you. Most of the time spent scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or LinkedIn does not bring you any closer to the life goals you might have set for yourself nor does it typically provide a meaningful, rewarding social connection. Going back to Robert Greene’s quote, repeatedly switching away from an important task to checking social media feeds in order to obtain that cheap dopamine hit, in my experience, weakens my capacity to wade deeply into thinking about problems and do my most valuable work — like researching, writing, and recording SuperDataScience episodes! In addition, peer-reviewed journal articles suggest that social media usage is associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety.

All of that said, there are some benefits to using social media:

You can keep abreast of what friends and colleagues are up to even if you don’t see them in person with any regularity.
You can keep on top of trends, such as those in the fast-moving fields of data science and machine learning.
You can discover valuable information-dense content, such as new podcast episodes, books, and journal articles.

So how can we obtain the best of what social media platforms have to offer while minimizing their harmful effects? First off, we could be judicious about following only content creators that produce worthwhile content for our professional pursuits or our rewarding hobbies. Alternatively, we can use software to track or set strict time limits on how much we use particular applications or websites (for example, you can use RescueTime on Mac OS or the built-in Screen Time functionality available on iOS). My personal approach these days, however, is simply to limit myself to one check of social media platforms per day.

Like the other habits I’ve already covered in my Five-Minute Friday episodes on my daily habits, I choose to log my “maximum one social media check” habit as a binary habit — either I checked more than once or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced Episode #538, I set the min column for this particular habit’s row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. If you feel like being fancier than my simple binary-flag suggestion, you could use data from a tool like RescueTime or Screen Time to instead log the number of minutes you spend on social media each day. If you monitor usage, it typically becomes a lot easier to manage over-usage.

All right, that’s it for today. Keep on rockin’ it out there, folks, and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon.