- Promptly-Yours
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- Be careful of what you "byte"
Quote
“The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown”
James Clear on X
Learning
Today’s newsletter delves into strategies for Content Dieting.
“Content dieting”, a fairly recent phenomenon, is important to be explored owing to how much time we spend on social media.
An average American spends two hours on social media.
Person scrolling through social media
Considering, we sleep for an average of 6 hours that’s 11.1% of our day being influenced by content creators, brands and might I say “propaganda”
It's rare for someone to spend 2 hours mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and proclaim, "I feel AWESOME.”
By going on a content diet we are not only being intentional of how our mood is going to be but also stimulating our opinion formation in a direction “we” choose.
Unfortunately, algorithms often box us into specific personas, creating echo chambers of ideologies. So, how do we mitigate this?
Check which social media you spend most time on - for example: Instagram
On Instagram app if you click on your following: it shows a category called - Most shown in feed - evaluate and ask yourself, for the person I am becoming (I would like to become) are these creators/pages providing me helpful knowledge?
Interestingly, on Instagram, you can mute posts, stories, or notes by account, providing a way to control your content exposure without unfollowing.
If your preference is for platforms like YouTube Shorts or TikTok, enable auto-delete for watch history to actively curate the content you expose yourself to.
Lastly and very importantly, if you don’t have the time to do the above mentioned stuff right now, BLOCK a reminder in your Calendar to get to it and don’t get swayed by the cute puppy video.
Prompt
What’s one thing associated with my social media usage that bothers me and one thing that is really value adding?
My own response to this prompt:
I am bothered by the algorithm knowing that I love food and it constantly bombards me with food videos.
A lot of times I go down on a rabbit hole and spend hours at stretch watching food content and making myself hungry in the middle of the night.
Since I am aware of this now, I am in a better position to not click on such videos unless I specifically want to look up a recipe of dish I am interested in making over the weekend.
As for value addition, I like getting inspired by content creators with a fair amount of success - such as Ali Abdaal and Hormozi to name a few.
Whenever I open instagram or X, I feel a wee bit more energized.
I was watching this movie called “After the Sunset” the other day, they have this reference to Remora fishes - which basically stick to sharks underbelly and eat scraps of prey dropped by the shark (I may or may not have given some spoiler alert to the movie)
Point being, living off of interesting content creator’s energy makes me feel like I am the remora fish. Feeding off their energy.
I hope you find your sharks. (Did you see the pun I did there with Shark Tank reference 😉)
That’s all for today.
Stay Cute and intentional,
Clerisa
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