It’s been a little over a year now of not working. At the time of resigning from my previous employer, Rapid Circle, I had been planning to take the year off and then decide what it is I wanted to do. However, truth be told, the plan was never to return to the kind of […]
Don’t Get Sucked Into YouTube Shorts
Let’s face it, the world now wants their content delivered in short bursts in a TikTok format…and I’m not so sure how I feel about that. Who would have thought that many years ago, as I dabbled with Snapchat to use as a working out loud medium and shared its value of providing content in […]
No More Screens After 5:30PM
So one of the things I’ve started doing (and which I hope lasts for a long time), is going on an “intermittent fast”. If we can do it for food, we can do it with our screens. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that when I’m in a gathering of people, there are […]
Schools Suing Social Media Companies
I’d hope to hear more schools and other institutions be able to do the same. This school district in Seattle is suing TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat for ‘exploiting the vulnerable brains of youth’ creating a mental health crisis for their practices that allow for addiction to their platforms. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/08/seattle-public-schools-sue-social-media-platforms-youth-mental-health-crisis I used to like social media […]
When You Cannot Read One Page of a Book, Time to Revisit Your Relationship with Social Media
Yesterday I overheard my husband watching Snapchat stories. What I overheard were the voices of people I used to watch and interact with online through the platform. “Wow, are they STILL on that?” I asked him. When you’ve been off social media for a while now (since June 2022), it’s difficult to reconcile in your […]
I Don’t Need to Tweet This
Thanks to David Hopkins for this excellent headline as I copied it from his recent blog post. (I hope he doesn’t mind). I’ve been reading his blog posts for some years and his recent one resonated. Many of his posts seem to me, to follow the same questions that I had been going through for […]
Unselfing
Today I saw an excellent post on the site Unselfing.Social and it’s such a great idea… As an experiment, for one continuous month, make the focus of one in every three things you share on social media — wherever you normally share, however regularly or irregularly you do, however many people you reach — something […]
Social Media Is Not Going to Save You
I stumbled upon this excellent post from the Indieweb wiki page, going down rabbit warrens as I do. It was written back in April 2021 called Social Media Isn’t Going to Save You From Social Media. In particular, scroll (!) your eye down to the section titled, “Convenience for the People; Power for the Corporations” […]
Our Attention Has Been Stolen
I published a new book review this morning on a book I recently finished reading. It’s Johann Hari’s new book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. In the book he provides the different causes over the years as to why we feel our attention and focus has been hijacked and offers a not-so-startling […]
Hibernating LinkedIn & Moving My CV Here
I have written about hibernating in my recent post LinkedIn Gone to Sleep which is a way I’m managing, well, let’s just say, filtering and directing all enquiries to come through my site here. About a couple of years ago, I used a specific code to Unfollow Everyone on LinkedIn and wrote about it in […]
We Live In Hope
Yes please. Please Facebook, please be like TikTok. This great post by Cal Newport, link above hopefully spells out the demise of Facebook where TikTok becomes the poison pill that “cripples” Facebook. We live in hope. “This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long […]
Yammer & Viva Engage: Same? Same?
Yes. Okay you can stop reading now. Seriously, it didn’t take long for the new announcement by Microsoft for people to start pinging me at work and on the phone (thankfully, I’m off social media or else my notifications would have been out of control). “Helen, you’re a Yammer fan, what do you make of […]
LinkedIn Gone to Sleep
Yesterday I was chatting with a friend through texts (I’m doing a lot of that now) and it was mentioned about ‘hibernating LinkedIn’. I hadn’t investigated this feature so this morning, I did that too. It’s not exactly permanently deleting but it just hides your profile until such a time that you need to use […]
I Googled Myself and This is What I Found
So I googled myself recently and found that someone had reblogged one of my posts onto his site and I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN I HAD WRITTEN THIS POST. It’s a gem of a personal post written in 2019 when I was going through the same angst about the lack of value that social media was […]
Changes I’ve Experienced Without Social Media in My Life
Here are some things I’ve been noticing now that I’ve permanently deleted social media from my life. It’s nearing 30 days now which means at the 30 day mark without re-entering my accounts, they are wiped of everything I’ve ever written and shared is permanently deleted. Years of work, photos, videos, followers and followings, ramblings. […]
Why I Left Social Media
I decided to share my thoughts via video on this one.
Update on LinkedIn: Stay or Go?
It’s been 2 weeks since I deleted Twitter. Do I miss it? Not at all! Facebook is now permanently deleted too. That is, I didn’t post anything in it for over a year now but I just decided to bite the bullet and permanently delete the accounts once and for all and become social media […]
I Permanently Deleted Twitter
I deleted Twitter on Saturday. I sat there on the kitchen table and clicked ‘Permanently Delete My Account‘. It was a weird feeling especially since I’ve been on it since 2007. After the archived tweets arrived in my inbox, it was time to delete Twitter once and for all. Under the Tweets section or the […]
Updating my YouTube Channel
For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to put some semblance of order on my YouTube channel and in frustration, I’ve realised it’s a MASSIVE job. There are over 400 videos on the site and as it’s a channel that is used as a record of work and learning, a portfolio if you […]
Building a Digital Profile
Some time ago, I was asked to present at an upcoming conference on the topic of Building a Digital Profile. I accepted as it was not only an interesting topic, also I valued the person who asked it of me, and it was also a paid opportunity. Since accepting the work, I have been doing […]