Where I started
I didn’t quit social media—I just put a little distance between us. I turned off notifications and limited myself to a few minutes in the morning and a few at night. That was the whole change.
What changed
More shifted than I expected.
- I had more idle, unstructured time on my hands
- I stopped panicking over everyone else’s progress
- The small decisions I make while building came faster
- I actually started finishing the books I’d left half-read
The “stopped panicking” part caught me off guard. Stepping back made me realize that, back when I was scrolling the timeline, every release announcement from someone else used to throw me off my own pace.
I’m not cutting it off completely
That said, I have no intention of going cold turkey.
- It’s where user feedback reaches me
- It’s where I can watch others in the same boat work through their own trial and error
- It’s where people get to discover the things I’m building
I don’t want to give up any of that, so in the end it really came down to how I engage with it.
Closing thoughts
Pulling back just far enough that I can treat it as a tool—that feels about right for now.