“I can’t believe how much time I waste on Facebook,” a friend once told me. “It’s not like there’s even anything good or interesting. I really should get rid of it.” My friend isn’t alone; plenty of people get little value out of social media. Yet many continue to use it more than they would like, often to the detriment of their productivity and mental well-being.
Facebook is hardly the only offender. People throw their hands up at Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and other apps and websites all the time. Leaving one platform for another (like dropping X for Bluesky) isn’t a solution, either. Still, not everyone wants to quit social media entirely. If you’re in that last group, try these strategies for limiting your use.
1. Disable Notifications
The fastest way to cut back on social media is to turn off all notifications for the platforms you use.
Social media sites design notifications to make it feel like something urgent and important is happening. That’s why they’re effective. When you turn them off, you are back in control of when and how often you open an app.
Disable all phone notifications for the apps in question and turn off email alerts. Do this for all the social media sites on which you feel you spend too much time. Make sure to turn off both badges and push notifications.
You’ll still see activity notifications in the app when you log in, but you won’t get them elsewhere.
2. Start a Digital Sabbath
Cutting 20% or 50% of your social media use per day is hard. Why? Because you don’t know how that feels. Try instead to cut out one whole day. That’s an easy concept to grasp and follow.
The idea here is to create a digital sabbath. Like a religious Sabbath, a digital sabbath is a set amount of time each week when you eliminate certain things to focus on others. For example, you could cut out all social media every Saturday to instead focus on family and reading.
With a digital sabbath, you get to make up the rules. You could say, “No internet from Saturday until Sunday, except for video calls and GPS maps to get around.” You might not even make it a full day and instead choose something like, “No phones or laptops after dinner and never in the bedroom.” Make rules that work for you and give you the desired outcome.
3. Track Your Usage and Set a Goal for Reducing It
It’s difficult to reduce your time on social media if you don’t know how long you spend on it. For this method, measure your time first and only then decide how much you want to decrease it. Maybe you will abhor what this exercise reveals, or maybe you won’t spend nearly as much time browsing as you thought. Either way, quantifying your usage can be a powerful motivator.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
The good news is that it’s easy to track your time. The RescueTime app, for example, records the amount of time you spend on different sites and applications—though it works best on desktop PCs. Apple’s Screen Time tool tracks how much time you spend on your iPhone and iPad, including the exact number of minutes in different apps. It’s under Settings > Screen Time. Most Android phones have a similar feature called Digital Wellbeing.
4. Block, Lock, and Delete
This method is a little more aggressive: block the websites, lock yourself out of your accounts, and delete any mobile apps.
Install a browser extension, such as StrictWorkflow or StayFocusd, that can block you from accessing any website you choose. RescueTime also works for this, so long as you pay for its premium version. These tools usually let you block sites for a certain time block or for a total amount of time per day.
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An even more aggressive way to block access to websites is through your home router via domain filtering. If you block a main website, such as Facebook.com, no device on your network will be able to open any pages from it.
The next step is to turn on multi-factor authentication for all the sites you want to use less often and then log out of them. This adds an extra step before you can hop back on the social network, slowing you down and making you consider what you’re doing.
Finally, delete the offending social media apps from your phone. If you want to sign in to them, you have to use the mobile browser or reinstall the app. Either way, this prevents you from impulsively opening an app.
5. Set Time Limits in Mobile Apps
This is my least favorite method for cutting back on social media. Essentially, you set time limits for apps (or groups of apps), and your phone warns you when you’re getting close to that threshold. You can do this on an iPhone (Settings > Screen Time > App Limits) or an Android phone (Settings > Digital Wellbeing > App Limits). A few social media apps have similar options.
The problem is that it’s not very effective or motivating. It requires you to have the willpower to stop once you see the time warning. It also doesn’t bring any new information about your habits to your attention. Finally, these limits are usually easy to override.
How Will You Use Your Newfound Time?
The real trick to cutting back on social media is appreciating the time you earn back. Don’t squander it. Be intentional about what you’d like to be doing instead. You could learn a language, for example, or take up photography.
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About Jill Duffy
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