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If you're online a lot, here are ways to make it a force for good in your life

My old phone died rather inconveniently in June. Apparently I had turned off the back-ups, and the phone stopped being able to charge, so I had just a short window of time to copy my data to a new phone before the battery died for good.

The result was that I was logged out of most of my social media accounts, and in the case of Instagram, had a beast of a time getting things reinstalled. So I took a social media break for about 6 weeks for Twitter (pardon me, X) and 3 months for Instagram (those are the two apps I find most compelling).

I won’t claim this experience changed my life. Instead, I learned that I feel a need to waste time in some fashion, and when I wasn’t on those apps, I started reading more of the comments on news sites, which weren’t any better.

But the experience did get me thinking about ways to curate one’s digital experience. A lot of productivity literature talks about how to limit your time online, or on social media, and there may be something to that. But if you accept that you likely will be scrolling around for some amount of time, here are ways to make it feel a little more wholesome.