Category: WorkCategory: Work

Social Media Escape Club isn’t a step by step guide to 10x your revenue without posting reels, it’s a journey with other creative individuals who want to feel better about how they spend their time.

Everything I write and share is from conversations and experiences with real life people making their escape in their own way.

1. People are ditching Goodreads in creative ways, both analog and digital.
2. Nicole Kelner made the Unplug OS app, which “locks your distracting apps… the only way to unlock them is to plug in your phone.”
3. Tracy Stewart left Google Workspace for Infomaniak. I started using cDox (thanks, Bagel) in place of Google Docs and Sheets for my own projects.
4. I’ll be talking with Michael Gilbride on Tues, Sept 22 at 3pm EDT to talk about how musicians can break away from social media platforms and stop playing games with Spotify. Register here via Luma to get a reminder, or just be on Substack at that time.
5. How do you find stuff without being on social media? Deanna Seymour made a bulletin board of upcoming events with people in her orbit. Imagine if we all shared all the cool things our friends are doing?
6. Bookmark this one: Obscure & niche digital resources I use for inspiration, case studies, mood-board building and more from Maria Izvestkina.

Just the fact that we have to ask “is this real?” 10 times a day is a major indicator that things have changed a bit over the years, and also everything costing 40% more than it did 12 minutes ago.

The world is different, folks. You’re doing the best you can.

Do I miss opportunities because I’m not on social media? Probably.

But I miss opportunities when I don’t go to the book event on a Tuesday night, or grab lunch at a small establishment after a run.

I’m not at a coffee shop in Brooklyn right now, I didn’t see a band last night in Nashville, I’m not meeting a friend at their office in LA tomorrow. I don’t have billboards, a podcast, a book, or an active YouTube channel.

As Ryan Holiday writes in “The Discipline Required To Create The Life You Want,”

“When an opportunity comes along or I’m faced with a decision, I ask myself: Will this get me closer to that ideal or further away? Will it give me more of the days I actually want to have, or fewer of them?”

All these social media platforms are an opportunity, just like going to a networking event, or being a guest on a podcast. Each has their own risk and reward.

But if we remove the time and energy required for these opportunities (the things we’re told we should do), we’re left with our work.

I got that Ryan Holiday link from Mario Fraioli’s Morning Shakeout newsletter. Mario coaches athletes, has sent a newsletter every week for over 10 years, and posts an occasional podcast.

“I’ve been approached about helping to build out coaching collectives, gotten offers to partner with more brands and events, and been given plenty of unsolicited advice about how to expand my coaching business or make the morning shakeout bigger than just a newsletter and occasional podcast. I say thanks but no thanks to every single one of these inquiries because the tradeoffs just aren’t worth it to me. Bigger isn’t always better, and oftentimes more is just more. I’m not a rich man by any stretch, but I have the discipline to say no, because I know that what I have is enough.”

Saying no to most opportunities is hard, but it leaves you the opportunity to make better work.

Part of breaking up with Google becomes abstract. Sure, you can say you’re not going to use Google Search anymore, but what about SEO?! How will people find your site if you don’t optimize your website for the random search traffic that the biggest search engine might send your way?

I’m not trying to get everyone on my Escape Pod Zoom calls. I’m trying to keep the people who keep showing up – those are my people! So I try to recognize where conversations are going, or themes that keep coming up. Those become future blog posts, or sometimes future Escape Pod Zoom calls.

Think less about reaching everyone, and think about reaching one specific person. Literally.

For your next post, don’t write for everyone. Instead, write to one specific person who might need it, and then send it to them directly a few days later.

On a recent Escape Pod call, we got talking about resisting the all of nothing approach to doing a thing.

Specifically, if you’re burning out at work, you don’t need to rage quit. Instead, rest for five minutes. That small dose of rest won’t fix everything, but as my guest brought up, if you do it for five minutes, you’ll want more.

Once we start down the road of “hey, this feels nice,” we start to make time for the thing that feels nice.

When I’m frustrated with something on the computer, I go for a five minute walk. And that five minutes usually turns into ten, which is ten good minutes away from the screen. Those ten minutes won’t get me to a 10 mile run, but they’re 10 minutes that’ll get me there eventually.

Think about how you could spend five (or 10) minutes on the thing you’d rather be doing. Again, it might not be the final version of the big thing you’d rather be doing, but what are the smaller bits and pieces you could do instead? What actions, even for just five minutes, help build the foundation of the thing you want?

I’ve written about all the attention we’ve paid to social media platforms over the years.

I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours. Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

Since May 26th, a few days after my 50th birthday, I decided to walk 10 miles a day. After a few too many months of inactiviy, I needed to get moving again. Walking this far takes me over three hours a day, so that’s three less hours of looking at my phone.

I talk about this a lot – the idea of taking the time we spend on social media and spending it on our craft. If we practiced our guitar more, wrote more poems, made more paintings, went for more walks, had more conversations, read more books – where could that lead?

Now, when I walked 10 miles that first day, nothing changed. But the hours add up, the miles add up, the movement adds up, and sometimes not in the most obvious ways. There’s no immediate prize, I just get to do it again the next day.

Walking 10 miles a day for 100 days didn’t lead to a finish line, but it reminds me of the concept of “increasing the surface area of luck.”

From James Clear (author of Atomic Habits):

“The forager who explores widely will find lots of useless terrain, but is also more likely to stumble across a bountiful berry patch than the person who stays home.

Similarly, the person who works hard, pursues opportunity, and tries more things is more likely to stumble across a lucky break than the person who waits.”

Spending three hours a day walking instead of scrolling has now led me to sign up for a “12 Hour Endurance Trail Run.” There’s a five mile trail loop, and I get to do it as many times as I can in 12 hours, with 200+ other people

It’s a new thing to go to, meet some people, have some conversations, and a whole lot of “getting out of my comfort zone” (literally and figuratively, of course). This is “surface area for luck.”

Practicing your guitar for three hours a day doesn’t guarantee you’ll play the Super Bowl Halftime show, or making pottery every day doesn’t promise a full time income, but these things can become conversation starters, or give you something interesting to talk about, maybe lead to a new friend – these things come along as a by-product of just doing a thing.

Walking 10 miles a day is not exactly aligned with the work I do in email marketing, or gathering people to talk about quitting social media, but maybe in a weird way it’s completely aligned.

Because if you want to leave social media, you need to put your time somewhere else, give your attention to something that needs your attention.

I was asked recently on a podcast “what am I running from” by seeking to escape from social media, and at the time I didn’t have a great answer, but I think I’ve come to the idea that to escape requires a destination.

We’re not seeking just how to delete an app or marketing without social media, but asking “where are we going?”