Harver

It's not surprising that you will lose focus doing 10 hrs non-stop. For my studying I always do an hr then a 10-20 mins break. In a work situation I imagine you wouldn't have time for a 20 min break but I'm sure even a 5 mintue break will help. Also, what do you do for your job? Would you consider it something that you find rewarding at all? You say that you have distracting thoughts and then this ends up in facebook and Twitter. How do you get from thoughts to facebook, what's the mechanism? Hope this helps

First of all I would agree that mainstream social media applications like Facebook,Youtube and Twitter are basically tools which can be used for higher or lower purposes. However, I don't (or seldom) use sites like ask.fm, snapchat etc. as I feel these are purely trivial and excessive bloat. On Facebook (even after some previous cutbacks - particularly on followed 'liked' pages) I still get a lot of garbage. However, from my own experience there seems to be less spam/meaningless posts on Twitter than on Facebook, perhaps it's because you can just follow your interests and it isn't unnatural (unlike fb) not to follow your friends with their garbage. My key point is, it's not what your following but your attitude towards what you are following; does it control you or are you controlling it? I get a very high amount of notifications and msgs (can get up to 30 notifcations a day), but over time (whilst there's still much more room for improvement) I've let go of a nuertoic need to check them straight away. I almost always leave going through my feeds until the end of day (and even then sometimes I don't bother). It's important to make it's only for relaxation, not out of some nuerotic need to read every single status from the past 72 hours. I suppose it fits into the wider theme of keeping a balance in life, allowing time for both the more trivial/'fun' things and making sure you (to quote leo gura) "get shit done". I would disagree that there needs to be a zero tolerance approach to social media, or even the most trivial content on those platforms. Remove all the 'fun' and you will eventually crack, and then that will be counterproductive towards your higher activities. Though I suppose with most of the masses the pendeulum is swung the other way.

London Borough of Sutton, United Kingdom