Thank you for being a friend.

Last week I took a break from all things social media.  

Facebook, which really wasn't that hard.  Twitter, which I thought I couldn't live without and my blog.  

Honestly, I didn't miss any of them.

What does that mean?

Here is what I learned from my self imposed social media exile.  

I don't need it as much as I thought I did.  And that was refreshing.  I had gotten so used to the idea of sending off a quick tweet or worrying about what my next blog post would be about, that I forgot what social media should really be about.  Fun.  It had stopped being fun for me and become more like a job.  I already have one of those, so realizing I looked at social media the same way was a real buzz kill.

It takes a lot of my time.  Okay, picture this.  I am sitting in my comfortable chair in front of the TV or lounging in bed, watching TV.  Guess what I always have?  Either my laptop, my smart phone or my iPad.  I thought I was great because I didn't always need to have my phone, or I didn't always need to have my iPad, but what I realized was this.  I did always need to have some connection to the net.  Why?  Because I was worried I might miss something.  Well, here is the real sadness to social media.  Worrying that you might miss something means you probably are and it's not the something you think.  All those nights I say glued to a wireless device just met that I wasn't  paying attention to the people around me.  

Don't get me wrong.  I don't want to let go of my connections to the outside world and social media has been a great tool for that.  But I don't want to spend so much time socializing with folks who have no vested interest in me that I miss spending time with the people who do.  That doesn't mean that I won't blog or tweet anymore, it just means I am setting limits for myself and cutting myself some slack when I digress.

Overall my experiment was a good one.  It taught me some things about myself I didn't really want to see, but at the end of the day am grateful to know.