Jacob Blackwell

Slow Living, Food, Design & Photography

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Putting Your Phone Down At Christmas

MY TOP TIPS FOR STAYING
SOCIABLE THIS CHRISTMAS.

I guess it’s not too uncommon for everyone to be on their phones and on social media this time of year. There’s always so so much going on in our lives and in the lives of those around us that we can’t help but share on and look at Instagram and Facebook countless times a day. Almost every year, you could say that my phone needed it’s own seat at the table. My laptop has become a permanent fixture to the living room, there so often that it may as well have become a decoration as I’ve scrolled down my feeds and liked away till to my hearts content.
Whilst this permanent use of social media helps to keep you connected to your friends it can isolate you from the people you’re physically around in the moment. These are some tips which I’m personally going to be putting to use this year and I thought you might too!

MANAGE YOUR TIME

Whilst it may seem like a little bit of an unusual thing to do, making time throughout the day where you allow yourself to actually have time on your phone might be a good way of preventing the use of it throughout the day. I’m personally one of those people who will use their phone almost any minute where their attention is not occupied with another task. If I’m watching a film and lose my attention for a minute, I’m instantly scrolling down Instagram or looking for a new image to edit ready to post.
By leaving your phone upstairs or on the other side of the room from where you are and actually allocating time to use it you’re not going to be reaching for it constantly and will instantly find yourself less distracted and engaging more with those around you.

KNOW WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT

There are good and bad situations to use your phone. When you’re sat at the dinner table with your family about to eat dinner, that’s probably not the best time to start scrolling down Instagram. When you’re sat on the sofa and everyone is relaxing, that’s the perfect opportunity.  Basically you need to judge if the situation is a sociable one or a personal one. If everyone is talking and interacting with each other, don’t be the one looking down at a phone screen.

SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

If you’re like me and make use of social media to publish and promote content, your time usually revolves around making sure you get content published, you promote your content and that everything is done on time. Whilst I’m not usually one who schedules posts and videos, this is definitley going to be something I make the most use of this festive period!
For tweets however I’ve recently began using the Buffer app to schedule my tweets automatically throughout the day. Either when I first get up in the morning, or sometimes late at night I’ll write up all the promotion tweets for different blog posts and videos and buffer them. What this means, is that the app will automatically tweet your content and your links for you at certain times throughout the day. You can actually control what times your tweets automatically go live on twitter, so if you know that your audience is particularly active around 2-5pm you could set it so that all the tweets are posted between those times. It’s definitley an app which has helped me keep on top of my blog promotion throughout the days where I’ve been at college, work or just been out somewhere where I may not necessarily have had Wifi to post the tweets myself.

What do you do to try and stay present during social situations?