Our head of social media had unplugged. While she was on a 10-day vipassana retreat embracing total silence with no phone, we at the office were looking deep into our brand’s social channels, scrambling to maintain consistency and connections without her expertise. We managed, with no major fires. But when she returned, her aura glowing amidst social media withdrawal symptoms, we were begging her to plug back in and bail us out.
The honeymoon is over for social media. While it used to be a fun diversion, the number of teens and twenty-somethings who consider social media important is declining, from 66% to 57% between 2016 and 2018. The links to eroding mental health are better documented every year. But with utilities like Instagram’s new in-app checkout, social channels are evolving more overtly into commerce channels. They remain important for professionals, and particularly for marketers. How do we balance our professional need for social media with our personal need to take space from it?
While social is good for commerce, it’s also killing our workflows.
Routine social media checks hurt our productivity and creativity. In his new book, Lifescale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive and Happy Life, Brian Solis points to some of the downfalls of social media:
“Some of the strongest findings about ill-effects concern our constant switching between apps and real-world tasks, or what researchers call rapid toggling between tasks,” he writes.
According to research from UC Irvine, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds for our brains to get back to a task after an interruption. And that means every time you “rapid toggle” over to a Twitter notification, it will take almost half an hour before your brain is back in the workflow. Such a drain on productivity costs companies money and sabotages a team’s creative energy.
After our head of social returned, we brainstormed about how to have a new relationship with social media. Here are three things we did to reclaim our team’s creativity and rid ourselves of digital distractions:
Create a social media-free bubble.
The first step is the easiest and hardest. We democratically agreed to make the office a “no social media zone,” with the exception of our head of social managing the brand’s accounts.
Like we did, you can have your team blacklist social media sites on their work computers’ browsers and pay for employees to download an app that blocks their phone’s social apps during time blocks you determine.
None of this is enforced at our agency — it’s all voluntary and on the honor system. But our team has unanimously voiced relief.
Work in sprints and climb the biggest mountains in the morning.
According to experts, the best way to work is in sprints of single-minded focus as opposed to multitasking. Consider the Pomodoro Technique, starting with 25-minute sprints, broken up by five-minute breaks. After a few sprints, take a longer break.
If you arrange your tasks with the biggest mountains first thing in the morning, you use your best brain power when it’s most needed and leave room in the afternoon for creative breathing room. Knocking out the big tasks early in the day has made me more energized and seems to have made the team overall more positive and solutions-oriented.
Connect during breaks.
The sans-social method calls for a different kind of break. This could be anything from a burst of exercise to a quick round of yoga, even giving someone a hug or a compliment. These are ways we can reconnect with our bodies and with the people around us.
We started taking “connection breaks” to have moments around the proverbial water cooler. During these times, we agreed to use intentionally supportive language with each other, saying something kind or practicing reflective listening. Those more introverted colleagues might prefer to do some jumping jacks or practice five minutes of mindful breathing. This alone has transformed our office into a place of nurturing, with a more dynamic exchange of ideas between more creatively empowered coworkers.
This redefining of our relationship to social media has proven a powerful way for our company to reclaim creativity and find new wellsprings of productive energy, without sacrificing our brand’s social channels. Creative companies, especially marketing ones, will benefit from running a company-wide check-in and updating their boundaries with distracting apps. Social media is evolving, and we should be too.
