I Got a "Work Phone" — An Experiment with Social Media Boundaries

Aug 22

In July, I was feeling really overwhelmed. with life. With that overwhelm came a lot of checking out with social media. I know that a lot of people can relate to this, but when I get stressed or I am overwhelmed, I usually try to disassociate by doom scrolling. That could be doom scrolling before bed, filling every pocket of white space that I have by checking my phone, checking my apps, my email, always having my phone in my hand, etc. I just got really sick of it back in July.

A little backstory is that over the last few months, ever since we moved, we just had a lot of changes, a lot of transitions, and we're just kind of falling into this pattern of lacking a routine. I'm someone who's very routine oriented, really thrive on routine, so not having that caused a lot of stress in my life. Not even to mention the stress of going through a home transaction, trying to sell her home back in Arizona, my husband's starting a new job, and us trying to find a new preschool for the boys. It's just a lot.

I had this realization that I didn't want to feel that way anymore, so I deleted all of my social media apps off my phone for two weeks. It really changed the way I was feeling and how I wanted to steward technology and my time moving forward. This is the start of a little experiment, and I'm hoping you're going to come along for the ride. I've shared a little bit about this on Instagram, and people have been very interested in kind of my thoughts and what I want it to look like moving forward. I just want to put the disclaimer that I am able to change my mind at any time! What I think right now may not be what I'm going to think in 30 days from now or six months from now. How I do things right now, it might look different in a little bit, just depending on how it goes. So, just giving myself permission to change my mind. I hope that as you are trying to find maybe more boundaries with social media or trying to figure out how you can steward your technology and your time better, you allow yourself to change your mind, too. if you think one thing is going to work really well, and then you just find that it doesn't, or, you want to try something else, then that's okay too.

So, I am starting out with a specific method, and I'm going to share that with you at the end of this blog, but I want to talk a little bit about my background in social media and how I got to this point. I have been chronically online since 2017, because that's how long I've built an online business. I would say, 2017, 2018, my usage wasn't terrible because I was teaching still. I couldn't be on my phone during the day. I was on my phone maybe a little bit before school, maybe a little bit after, but there wasn't a lot of time for me to even be on my phone. But I had started building my business online in 2017, so that's when I started really utilizing social media as a habit and a part of my daily routine.

2019 came around, and I feel like the scroll wasn't so bad still. I felt like I wasn't spending a lot of unintentional time on my phone. I still was just using it for work, using it to create. I didn't really struggle with my relationship with social media. It felt really good. I also wasn't a mom then, so I had a lot more capacity and time both mental capacity and capacity in my day to be on my phone more if I needed or wanted to. I don't really remember having any kind of feelings towards it back then either.

But 2020 came around, and that was the first time I felt like I wanted to delete all the apps and just disappear off the Internet. I'm pretty certain that I was not the only one who felt that way. I was so overwhelmed by everything. I was also pregnant with my first baby, and really struggling with the consumption of content online. Consuming the 24 hour news cycle, consuming other people's opinions, consuming what other people think or even think that you should do, their judgments or their opinions, or even their posts that are intended for inspiration. I think sometimes we can get a little lost in that, which I'm going to talk about a little bit more. It just I felt like I was being inundated with content in 2020.

Then in 2021 was actually the first time that I had taken a really solid break from social media and from my phone. iIt was in the summer of 2021 when I was really starting to think about wanting to pivot into a new business. I took two weeks off social media, and I remember it so vividly because we traveled to my friend's wedding in Tennessee. Luke was like 10 months old at this time. We traveled with him for one of the first times. I think he had gone with us to Colorado maybe once or twice before then, but this was a much bigger travel situation…like a connecting flight. We ended up losing our bags, and it was actually a travel nightmare. That was during the time that I took my two-week break, so we went and celebrated my friend getting married. Then I came back, and I was still offline for a few days. I got back on, and I kind of had this like good reset. That's the only other time that I've taken a break from social media. I would like to say that I could use the excuse that my business is online, and I use social media to run my business, but I don't know. I struggle with that because I'm like, yes, to an extent, but also, there are other ways to run a business, there are other ways to do things, and I really think I should have been taking breaks more often than I have been.

So that's kind of like lesson number one that I've had, because this break that I just took last month I was all worried about my business burning to the ground and me becoming irrelevant, but knew I needed to take the break. I ended up having sales over the time that I had taken the break, I ended up with more podcast downloads than ever before, and even more email subscribers. It's just crazy the things that we tell ourselves, especially as business owners, when it comes to marketing tools. We are also told all the time, that you have to show up consistently and you can't take a break, the algorithm, and all this stuff. But I think that's just like bogus. I think this is not true. So that's also something that I'm working through, or kind of my thoughts around that.

Anyway, 2021 was the last time I had taken a good, solid break. It was two weeks, just like this last time. This time I just went into it really unplanned. Like it was just not planned at all. It was a Friday afternoon. We were getting really close to closing on our house, and things were really stressful. I was feeling tired and overwhelmed. I could feel myself not being really present in my day-to-day and in my life. I was feeling really unmotivated, uninspired, and just kind of blah about everything. So, I just decided one thing that I can control is I can delete all social media apps off my phone, and I can just take a break until we get into the house. That was my thought on a Friday afternoon. I just had gotten to this point where I was just so sick of consuming. I was so sick of trying to just fill white space. I was so sick of having my phone in my hand all the time. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to take a break. I didn't announce it. I didn't say anything about it. I just decided to take two weeks off. I deleted all the apps. I decided I'm going to come back after we get into the house. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. I wasn't really sure at that point. I knew I wanted to at least stay off until we got into the house. That's what I did, and honestly, the first two days it felt kind of weird.

I think that's what happens when you are detoxing from so much phone usage, consumption, and all that kind of stuff. So, it felt a little weird. I did still find myself picking up my phone to go check Instagram, but I didn't have Instagram anymore. I would realize that and be like, oh, I don't even have it. So let me not do that. Let me just sit in this moment and not do anything. Just sit here, just walk to wherever I'm going, or just stand in line somewhere. So, the first couple of days were a little weird, but by Sunday night, I felt really good. I remember telling my husband, I could do this forever. I don't want to go back. I just was straight up like I want to figure out a way to run my business without social media. That was kind of the thought at first. I was like, what would that look like? I kind of worked through some of that. I just felt so good. I felt so like free. I felt so present. I felt just like really great not having it.

Then the next week was the first full week of me being off, and that was the week that we were moving into our house. That week, I started to just feel a little bit more inspired. I felt a little bit more creative. Not even a little bit. I felt a lot more. I felt a lot more creative. I felt a lot more inspired. I started coming up with content ideas like nobody's business. I mapped out all of our podcast episodes from this point in July, all of August, all of September, and all of October. It was just flowing through me. I started to realize that I wasn't burnt out on creating content. I was burnt out on consuming it. This is the moment when I really started to realize I actually don't hate being on social media, hate showing up, sharing and creating content, educating people on becoming a VA, and that kind of thing. I just don't like getting sucked into the trap of consuming the content from other people, especially when it's just unintentional and kind of just in a very mindless fashion. If I'm being intentional about it, I want to go see what my friends are up to and watch their stories, engage on people's posts, etc.

I just noticed that I felt so much better. I was sleeping so much better because I wasn't on my phone before bed. I felt more present. I felt more patient. I was way more creative. I actually felt more inspired, which I think is really interesting because I think a lot of times we go to social media to get inspired, right? We want to feel inspired. We want to be inspired to cook a recipe, do some kind of workout, things in our home, and how we should decorate. We're looking for inspiration sometimes, and I started to find that I was actually more inspired being off of it, and actually looking within myself for inspiration. I found that I was relying so much on social media and for other people to tell me what I should be inspired about instead of me finding inspiration in my own day-to-day life or in my own opinions. I found myself when we started looking at stuff for the house ordering things that I loved and not because someone on Instagram told me I should love it. I feel like I've been finding my own style again, especially in terms of decorating my house versus it looking like everybody else's. I don't know if that makes sense. I hope that makes sense. I just think sometimes everyone has all the same stuff because of social media. I'm really pleased to announce that my desk for my office and my chair in my office were things that I just found on my own. No one told me I should buy them. I've never seen them from other people. They were just really awesome finds, and they're totally my style. I just think that's really cool. I'm not saying I'll never buy something that's recommended by someone else or isn't like a popular item, because I actually have my eye on a couple of chairs that are from Walmart that I really want for my office that are viral on social media. But I am saying that sometimes I think we look outside of ourselves for inspiration and creativity when really all of that's within ourselves. If we just get quiet and cut out the noise, we can find that within ourselves.

With coming back to social media, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. There was a part of me that didn't want to come back. I do value social media in a marketing tool kind of way, but I didn't want to totally give up on it. I also really enjoy social media for connecting with other people. There are people that I would have never met in my life, become friends with, or have really awesome relationships with if it weren't for social media. So I'm not anti-social media. I'm just anti-overconsumption of social media and figuring out what that looks like for each individual person. I decided I wanted to set some boundaries in place to help me with that goal in particular, to focus on the creation, to focus on the education, to focus on how I can put what I do out into the world and help other women make money through becoming a virtual assistant, through just me sharing different things about my life, me sharing about this on social media and hopefully inspiring other people to have a little bit more intentionality behind their time and their technology, whatever that might be.

I wanted that to be the priority, so I decided that I'm going to make the podcast my main place that I create content. That's why we've started putting out one to two episodes a week instead of just one a week, one every couple weeks, or like once a month. Now the podcast is more of a priority over social media. Also, my email list. Getting emails sent out to my email list more often than I am even creating on social media. Also I decided to do something a little radical. I got a work phone and I am so excited about it. A lot of people recommend certain apps for putting your apps in timeout. I think those are really great. I think they work really well for people. I actually really like the brick. If you haven't heard of it you can brick your phone, and you tap it to this little square, and it locks you out of the apps that you decide you want to be locked out of, and you cannot unlock those apps until you tap it to that square again. So if you're in a different room you have to get up, go to the other room to unlock it, and it keeps you from that mind mindless scroll and opening of apps, because if you're just doing it mindlessly, then you're not going to want to get up and go tap it. I actually really loved that. I found that that was really helpful. In the move, I lost my brick, so I haven't been using it. I thought about getting another one, but I wanted a little bit more of a physical boundary. I decided that I wanted to get a separate phone for all of my social media apps, all of my work apps, including email, and Slack. We had an iPhone that was broken. And I was like, you know what? I should just take this phone in and see if we can get it repaired, and I can use this as my work phone. So I did. It turns out AT&T, because we have insurance on our phones, replaced the phone with a brand new iPhone 16 Pro for $150. I was like, that's a steal. So we got a new phone.

Actually, as I'm recording this podcast, I got the phone yesterday, and what I did immediately was I uploaded all of my social media apps, all of my work apps onto the work phone, and I deleted all of them off my personal phone. Also with my work phone, there's no cellular line to it. I didn't get another phone number or anything. I just created a new Apple ID with my work email, so it's a separate Apple ID. We're just using it on Wi-Fi because it's something that's going to stay in my office, because I don't need it. The idea is that I don't need to be doing work things and checking the apps and whatnot when I'm not working. Really having more intentional time around how I utilize social media and for me I want to prioritize its use for work, use it to connect with you guys, and share parts of my life because I do enjoy that you guys are following along on a health journey that I'm on, sharing fun things that happen in my day-to-day, my hobbies, me baking sourdough even though I can't eat it because now I'm gluten-free,all that kind of stuff. I'm sharing that very intentionally in a specific window that I'm in my office with my work phone, and so the work phone is staying in my office. I have a charger set up for it in my office. There's a little spot that it’s going to stay. Basically, there's this physical boundary of everything is on there versus my personal phone. I'm really excited about it because I think again, it's going to help with that intentionality. Of course, I could come into my office, get the phone if I need to, and do something on it if I have to outside of my work hours. That's fine. I think just that additional accountability of do I want to mindlessly scroll or do I actually need to do this right now?

I am going to do a 30 day experiment with this. Hopefully, it works really well and it lasts longer than that, but I kind of want to do 30 days of just updating you on how it goes, telling you how it's been, what the pain points may have been, if everything just feels really good and solid, how it impacts my life in like a positive way, how maybe it makes things more difficult, etc. This is technically day one because I just got the phone yesterday. This is day one, and in 30 days, I will do a check-in to let you know a little update if it's something you're interested in. I think that any way you try to be more intentional with your technology is good. I started reading the book, The Unplugged Hours: Cultivating a Life of Presence in a Digitally Connected World by Hannah Brencher. I started reading that before bed, when I'm in the bath, and winding down for the day, and I love it. I would 10 out of 10 recommend that book. She talks about just like turning off your phone for an hour a day, totally unplugging, and what that looks like.

So that's a little update. I promised I would give one. Like I said, I reserve the right to change my mind at any point on how I handle this, but hopefully I'm not alone. It feels kind of like a vulnerable topic because no one likes to say that they spend too much time on their phone, that it affects their mood, or it affects how they show up in the world. I just really started to notice how much the input of technology was affecting my output in my day-to-day life. I want to change that, and hopefully, this inspires you to change it if it's something you struggle with too. I would love to hear if this blog resonated with you, and if it's something that you are trying to do more or be better at. You can send me a message over on Instagram, and we can have this conversation because I would absolutely love that. But that's it for today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and just always know that I'm rooting for you!