A Quick Post on How I Minimise Social Media Usage

Hello! It has been a long time since my first blog post. This will be a quick blog post covering the different apps and tools I use to block and minimise social media usage across my devices. Social media used to leech off of my day, making me feel miserable and meaning I had much less time for genuinely productive or enjoyable activities.

My approach to minimising social media usage is honestly just to block the platforms. I realised that the negatives of using them far outweighed the benefits, so I mostly just stay off them. The main social media platforms I use are literally just WhatsApp and email (I also post on Instagram, but I don't actually use Instagram—and I've got a good loophole for this one later on).

This blog post will be split up into two parts: Phone and PC, because not all tools can be used on both devices.

Phone

Your phone is your most accessible piece of tech, and so it is vital that you control your phone usage in order to live a good life. Otherwise, every slight moment of boredom or discomfort can easily be remedied by a quick (actually 1–2 hour+) scroll on your phone.

The main app I use for this is called Burnout Buddy (available on iOS only; for Android, the closest alternative is apparently called Lock Me Out, though I've never tried it so cannot say how good it is).

The point of this app is that you can select which apps and websites to restrict and then set custom conditions for locking and unlocking these apps. This could be based on the time of day, location, or fully customisable via the Shortcuts app. Basically, a much more advanced version of Apple's Screen Time feature, and also much more difficult to disable.

This is because you can enable something for each block called Strict Mode, where you have to tap your phone a certain amount of times before unlocking it. I've customised this setting so I need to tap my phone 1,000 times, wait 60 seconds, and then tap my phone another 200 times before I get the option to disable the blocks. So unless you are in a desperate situation, you are very unlikely to want to go through all that pain, meaning that these blocks stay on.

I've set up this app so that YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, all streaming platforms, and all non-Safari browsers are blocked at all times of the day on my phone. The reason I have blocked non-Safari browsers is because they can be used to avoid the browser extension I am going to talk about below.

For the uses I've talked about, this app is fully free. But if you want extra customisability, you only need to pay £10 for life. And because this app will likely save you hundreds if not thousands of hours, this is an insanely good deal at only a few pennies per hour of your life (not sponsored btw).

Now, I mentioned above that I don't use Instagram, but I also mentioned that I post on Instagram. The way I do this is actually through an official app called Meta Business Suite. On here, I can post videos and respond to comments/messages. BUT, most importantly, I have no way of accessing other people's reels, stories, or any other posts. I can upload my own content without having to waste time scrolling. It's amazing.

Note: For some reason, Meta Business Suite does not let you message in group chats, only in 1-to-1 messages. So I'd highly recommend that you convince any friend groups to switch over to WhatsApp or another messaging platform that doesn't have short-form content on it (Messages, Signal, etc.) if you're serious about minimising phone usage.

I also use a Safari extension called SocialFocus. This allows you to customise lots of different social media websites to remove the distracting sections of them. For example, Reddit can be a very useful source of information when you have a niche question that isn't being answered very well elsewhere. BUT, because of the recommended posts they provide you, you can often fall into a rabbit hole of junk information after that original question you had.

SocialFocus is a roughly £6 for life purchase, but highly worth it in my opinion. For example, on LinkedIn, I have blocked my home feed (which is honestly just full of AI slop and non-valuable content), allowing me to instead focus my efforts on growing my network and updating my own page. (Though I am considering blocking LinkedIn for phone, and only allowing it on my PC just because I don't see much benefit of using it on my phone).

Also, while I did say I don't use Instagram, annoyingly, a lot of university societies use Instagram to funnel people into their WhatsApp groups. So in the rare case I do need to use Instagram, SocialFocus allows me to block all recommended reels, posts, stories, and explore page suggestions, meaning that I can go directly to the society page, click their WhatsApp link, and get out of Instagram ASAP.

For some reason, I have a Screen Time setting which prevents me from disabling extensions on Safari (no clue how I managed to enable this, and I honestly don't want to find out). Combining this with SocialFocus' start-up delay timer means that it is very hard for me to bypass any of these restrictions that I have set up for myself.

Computer

The absolute GOAT of computer software to handle addictive websites is called Cold Turkey Blocker. For almost all use cases, it is free, but if you'd like to support the developer or want some slight extra functionality, you can pay a £28 lifetime fee (or £35 if you are not a student).

The way this app works is that you can either block certain websites, or you can block certain phrases (you can also block apps if you pay the £28). The website blocking is very useful for the cases I mentioned above: blocking social media, streaming websites, gaming websites, etc.

But the phrase blocking tool is insanely powerful. If there are certain topics that you keep finding on new, unblocked websites (for this example, let's say Fortnite), you can simply block the keyword Fortnite in the format *fortnite*. Now any website that contains Fortnite anywhere in their URL will get instantly blocked. I'm sure you can see how powerful this is, especially if you block all keywords and spelling variations of whatever frequent time-wasting topics you use, leaving behind no possible way to access that topic anymore.

Cold Turkey Blocker has a variety of different ways to make unblocking websites difficult. My favourite is the random gibberish typer: you have to type out a sequence of gibberish (e.g. AGCd@fe3j8as#dg3E) in the exact order it's shown in order to unblock the websites. Most of my blocks have between 150 to 1,200 characters depending on how problematic I think a website is. Very boring. Very effective.

I also use SocialFocus on PC. Here it is fully free, with all the same functionality as on phone, so I can benefit from websites like Reddit or LinkedIn, without having to suffer from their addictive features.

Conclusion

I hope you have found these suggestions useful. They have saved countless hours for me and I am very grateful that I found these apps.

However, I must admit that while these apps are highly useful, there have been some times when I've unblocked my social media for a genuine cause, but then later misused them. For example, I recently unblocked YouTube to learn more about a certain software I had to use for work. Turns out, the information on YouTube was actually worse than what AI was telling me, and then I wasted some time on random videos. So while these apps do make using distracting apps harder, there is still some discipline and willpower required.

Also, while blocking apps has been the best method for me, you may find that you need certain apps more than others and so blocking them wouldn't work. I hope the combination of the blocking app, as well as the SocialFocus website customiser, will allow you to customise your experience to best suit your needs. If you want to discuss more about these topics or have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via Instagram (and I'll get back to you via the Meta Business Suite app) or email and I'll be more than happy to respond.

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