3 Surprising Business Benefits Of Taking Time Off From Social

We're all used to hearing about the benefits of taking a break from social media: a better mindset from not having compared ourselves to everyone else, better sleep from not scrolling into the night, and being more present in our day to day lives. But when I took a break for two days, this last weekend, I discovered three surprising benefits to my business as well. If you haven't already listened to episode 12 with Chris Emmer, where she was talking about doing Instagram on your own rules, she challenged us to take weekends off from Instagram to not feel beholden to the algorithm, to not give in to the FOMO, and really just allow ourselves to have a reset. While I was pretty freaked out about the idea. I committed to it really publicly on Friday on my Instagram, knowing that I would need that accountability. I also deleted the app from my phone. And while I felt all the usual benefits, you hear people talking about, I slept better cause you're not scrolling into the night. I was much more present in what I was doing. My mindset was better because I wasn't living vicariously through somebody else's Insta fabulous life. While I was curled up under my duvet, trying to get rid of a cold that I've had for over a week. I found a couple of really surprising benefits for my business that I want to share with you here. The first was that it really allowed me to see where I'm being inefficient in my business. So I was working on something for the podcast over the weekend, and I realized that when there was a time lag in my system, you know, maybe I was waiting for podcasts to transcribe, or I was waiting for a file to upload. My natural tendency was to reach for my phone and to allow Instagram to entertain me. Without Instagram, it became really clear to me that the order in which I was doing things in this particular process was completely inefficient. I had waiting times built in that I wasn't doing anything else in. If I swapped up the order of the process, things could be uploading while I was working on something else. That was really shocking to me. I didn't realize how many times I reached for my phone in a day while I was bored. The second thing I noticed is that having that undisturbed time and that inability to know what anybody else was doing in their business allowed the back of my brain to be processing what's going on in my business instead of wondering, you know, where, so, and so got those shoes or how they're doing that in their business. My brain actually began to process the problems I've been facing in my business. The things that I couldn't quite get to mesh and after about a day and a half, something clicked for me that I have been struggling with for a couple of weeks, so that come Monday morning, I'm able to sit down and work immediately on the fix. And the third thing it allowed me to do is to really remember that I am connected to people beyond DMs, beyond their stories and landed up having an amazing Voxer conversation with one of my friends who is also in business. And we really dived deep into what was going on in her business, what was going on in my business. the ability to step out of just the DMs as a method of communication was incredibly valuable not just to our friendship, but to my business as well. So why do I share all of this with you? whenever I see people say, Oh, I'm going to take a break from social media. I'm a bit like eye-rolly and be like, okay, great. Yes, you're gonna sleep better and you're gonna have an amazing mindset. But I want you to really think about actually, could this be valuable to my business? I want to encourage you to do this for your business and just try it out and see what happens. You will still get the mindset and the sleep benefits, but I'll bet you'll get some business ones too.