Winding it down

Since last writing on Boxing Day, I’ve wound down all my social media activities.  I’ve chopped my networks back in size, ready for the winter of quiet, helping me maintain as little noise attempting to pull me back as possible.  I’m toying with the idea of even temporarily closing down my Facebook account on 31st December, just to make sure I’m not going to cheat.  That’s the biggest pull of all really – just because you don’t visit the site anymore, doesn’t mean the site forgets about you.  Oh no.  The Tweets kept coming to my mobile as I’d forgotten to shut off mobile alerts.  And Facebook will email me regardless of whether I’m actually looking or interested.

Flickr will be tough too, as it’s one of the few social media services that I feel really has enriched my life, but it’s only a month for God’s sake.  I can do it.

The thing I am most interested to find out is what, if any impact this experiment will have on my professional life.  I’ve been frustrated by the intrusion of my working life into my private life for quite some time now; yet I’m the instigator of it.  I’ve been holding the belief that I have to be a big noise, that I have to shout about what I’m doing, with whom, and when.  A beacon for my own public relations and selling myself all over the place.  Did I make this up, to allow an addiction to come through unchallenged?  Or is it acually true, will I find myself with less work and less contact from a month out of the “scene”.

I’m not missing any of it yet, if anything the more time I spend away the more I want to delete, cancel, quit and remove.  We’ll see 🙂