How you can use a social media break to improve your freelance business.
For those of you that follow me on social media anyway, you’ll know that I’ve taken a bit of a social media break for the last month or so, it’s the second time this year that I’ve done it, and I honestly think it’s one of the best things you can do to get yourself back on track again. I usually do it when I feel like I’ve lost my way a little bit, either personally or with my career, and I wanted to make sure that it really paid off this time. I’ve obviously still been working on client work etc. but I haven’t really checked any of my social media feeds for the last month or posted anything myself! So I thought this time it might be beneficial for myself and some of you guys if I wrote a blog post about how I used my social media break to improve myself and my business incase it gives you any ideas!
So, first things first, if you’re going to have a social media break, you’ve got to do it properly, otherwise it definitely won’t have the full effect that it could!
- Delete any social media apps from your phone - (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.), this way, when you naturally unlock your phone and start swiping to find the apps, you will realise you’ve deleted them and be reminded that you’re not supposed to be looking at them anyway.
Deactivate any accounts that you can - I mainly did this just with my Facebook account, but again this is just another obstacle in your way that reminds you that you’re not supposed to be logging into any of these accounts.
Set a blocker on your web browser for when you do come back to social media - You can get extensions for your web browser (google chrome at least) that block which sites you can go to. The one I use is called Focus, and I have it set so that between the hours of 7AM and 7PM, I only have a total of 10 minutes to spend browsing any social media sites, once that time is up, it blocks any access to those sites until 7PM!
It is hard to get out of the habit, but you quickly forget about checking social media once the apps aren’t there and you realise how much you don’t miss checking it!
How you can use the benefits to your advantage.
Your brain has less to think about and therefore you can focus more on the important things.
Even if you don’t realise it, if you’re scrolling through social media on a daily basis then your brain is being filled with all sorts of new inspiration, ideas, worries and new thoughts to process in general. So a couple of days into your social media break, chances are you won’t have as much to process in your head and will be able to put more of your energy into the things that matter.
This could go either of two ways though, because if you don’t know what to start focusing more on, your thoughts could go in a very negative direction instead, so the next point is also extremely important.
Think about what you want from your career and life itself.
I think this is by far the most important and beneficial thing you can do to improve your life in general, yourself and your career and it’s definitely something you should do on a yearly basis at the very least but I personally prefer to do it more often. I don’t think there’s any set way to tackle this but what I tend to do is to firstly think about 3 main goals I want to achieve in life, for example, my biggest goal is to be able to comfortably live the lifestyle I want to live from my various income streams as a freelance illustrator.
I pretty much used up about 10 A4 sheets of paper making brainstorms and checklists covering things such as what kind of principles and values I want to stick to as a person, all of the little annoying tasks I need to check off and new project ideas. One very important thing I also did was to think about all of the things I would do (both career and personal wise) if I didn’t have any limitations.
For example, for me there’s a lot of things I want to do but I don’t out of fear, and although my fear is perfectly valid just as I think most people’s fears are valid whether other people agree with it or not, it holds me back so much and it’s really not worth it. There’s a lot of new personal projects I want to do, I want to get back into vlogging on Youtube and Twitch streaming, so I made notes of literally everything I want to do regarding those areas. Getting it all down on paper meant that it wasn’t running through my mind so much and meant that I could put a solid plan in place to make all of these things happen! (If fear really does hold you back, read the book ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ I’m not going to promise that it’ll change your life but it’ll definitely have an impact!
Now you have all of these ideas and thoughts down on paper, you have to break everything down so that you can make sure all of these things you want to do actually happen!
Set new goals.
The problem I always used to have is that I ALWAYS used to set way too many goals, I think that this can definitely work for some people if you set yourself lots of small goals to work towards throughout the year, whereas I find I work better if I set myself 3 big goals for the whole year. A year is short enough that if you work on something and it doesn’t work out, you haven’t really wasted that much time on it, but it’s also long enough that at the end of the year you can see whether it is actually benefiting you or not.
I feel like I’ve had a bit of a slow start to the year, but instead of getting down about it, I thought it would be best to have a fresh start now and set myself 3 new goals to achieve by the end of the year that will help to improve either certain aspects of my career or to make me a better person. So my 3 goals now are:
- To consistently upload weekly videos to my Youtube channel.
To work most of the way through my 50 sharks project (something I’ll talk about in a later post).
To create and sell more products through my website.
My first vlog that I uploaded not long after setting myself these new goals.
I feel like these 3 goals are extremely important to me in furthering my career, although they are not essential, I think that they will get me closer to the kind of career as a freelance illustrator that I want and also challenge me to work on some of my fears such as vlogging and uploading it for everyone to see!
One thing I’ve really struggled with is comparing myself to others and not necessarily thinking I should have the same wants as others, but I thought that maybe I should be working towards the same goals if I want to get to the same place as them career wise. However when I have a chance to reflect back on everything I always come back to the fact that I’m always the happiest and create my best work when I just work on what I want to, and I think that’s a mentality we should all have, especially when you’re working for yourself. Create work you love to create and share it, there will always be people out there who love it.
Set yourself at least one daily task for self improvement.
One thing that will really help towards at least one of you goals is to set yourself a task to do each morning for a specific amount of time that you always do before anything else. This way, you have no distractions, you get into a habit of completing that task every day and even if you have a bad or non-productive day, you’ve still devoted that small amount of time to help you to reach your goal. It could be as simple as completing one sketch in an hour or reading a chapter of a skill building book in half an hour. For me I devote an hour every morning on some quick anatomy studies for 20 minutes, and then I either do some other studies or just sketch whatever I feel like for 40 minutes. This ensures I’m building my anatomy drawing skills whilst also building up my drawing skills in general, whilst sketching what could become new ideas. I also then devote another hour to working on a personal project which is currently the 50 sharks project. I still work a full day after these 2 hours on client work but I feel much better knowing I’ve already put the time in to work on my own personal goals.
The longer the better.
It’s very easy to do all of the above steps and think that you’ve done what you need to and can go back to spending ridiculous amounts of time procrastinating and scrolling through your Instagram feed, but I think it’s best to set a decent chunk of time that you want to be on a social media break for before you start any of these steps. I set myself at least a month, and it’s felt good to have a few weeks working on my new goals etc. without the pressure of having to share anything with anyone, and even after a month, I definitely don’t miss social media.
Taking a social media break is one of those things that I do think will work for everyone regardless of who you are or why you're doing it so I hope that these points help some of you if you do decide to go through with it!