Social Media Outage – Productive Ways to Redistribute Your Time
Across the globe, people recently encountered a social media outage. Although inconvenient, it posed a good opportunity to think about other ways to spend your time.
Were you one of the 500,000 social media users across the United States that was impacted by the social media outage from earlier this month? Meta encountered issues locking many people out of their accounts, with several users still encountering those issues today. There were droves of people texting their friends “I think I’ve been hacked” and “Are you able to log into Facebook or Instagram?”
Many users of these accounts were locked out of their personal channels for most of the day, and although frustrating and disruptive, it offered a good opportunity to do some reflection about social media usage. On average, people are spending 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media. Our society is at an all-time-high with mindless scrolling to pass time and distract. In UITS, we are committed to social media and understand its value for connection and information but recognize its impact on mental health and productivity.
It's a good time to evaluate your social media usage. Are you one of the folks spending nearly 2.5 hours a day scrolling social channels? Perhaps your usage is higher or lower. If you shave off just 10 minutes a day of that scrolling time to take a brisk walk, call a loved one to catch up, study a new language, or meditate, you may notice a considerable impact over time with overall wellbeing and lowered stress.
Life and Work Connections through the University is a great place to start to generate ideas on how to incorporate more activities to benefit physical and mental health outside of social media usage. There are multiple upcoming online events created to educate employees on wellness including A Financial Guide from Women and Move Arizona, an 8-week long movement program designed to build healthy movement habits with employees.
If you’re looking for good ways to diversify your free time, take a look at the Life and Work Connections website where you will find an array of ideas, virtual and in-person events, and opportunity for employee connection.