--- title: What I Learned From Taking 10 Days Off Social Media, Email description: I discovered I don’t need a phone to hide from being present canonical: https://time.com/4021307/10-days-off-social-media-and-email/ author: Jon Acuff article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-09-03T14:06:50.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:17.678Z article:section: Ideas og:title: 7 Lessons I Learned From Taking 10 Days Off Social Media and Email og:description: I discovered I don’t need a phone to hide from being present og:url: https://time.com/4021307/10-days-off-social-media-and-email/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 7 Lessons I Learned From Taking 10 Days Off Social Media and Email twitter:description: I discovered I don’t need a phone to hide from being present twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # 7 Lessons I Learned From Taking 10 Days Off Social Media and Email > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=2dec8f03-cb2d-4db6-88a9-2a2b3c20aa24&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Social Media Can Tank Your Career [Watch (HLS stream): How Social Media Can Tank Your Career](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZetPsIZy.m3u8) (4:12)  _Published 2015-03-11. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a powerful way to build your brand or destroy it._ by [Jon Acuff](https://time.com/author/jon-acuff/) ## Jon Acuff Sep 3, 2015 2:06 PM UTC by [Jon Acuff](https://time.com/author/jon-acuff/) ## Jon Acuff Sep 3, 2015 2:06 PM UTC Have you ever been excited about a red light because it meant you could use your phone for 34 seconds while driving? Have you ever developed the sleight of hand skills of a card shark so that you can hide your phone when a flight attendant comes by to check that you’ve got it in airplane mode before takeoff? No? Just me then? Fair enough. You’re a bastion of Luddite technological resistance. You probably printed this article out on homemade paper you dried in a backyard kiln next to your suburban chickens. Ten days off of social media is laughable to you. To me, it was a marathon of epic proportions. In case you didn’t notice the more than 40,000 tweets sent from my account [@JonAcuff](https://twitter.com/JonAcuff), I use social media a lot. I also get lost mentally in email when I check it on my phone. A single message can parachute me right out of a vacation moment if I dare to sneak a glance at it. So for 10 days I didn’t check any social media or my email. I had some pre-scheduled updates already going out, like tweets about a charity event I did, but for that 10-day period I didn’t touch any social media or open my email. Here’s what I learned during that experience. **1\. Putting your phone down doesn’t trigger an avalanche of creativity.** We sometimes demonize our phones, as if they are singlehandedly ruining our lives and blocking us from untold moments of quiet reflection and the creativity these always carry. Maybe my break wasn’t long enough, but upon putting my phone down, I did not find in its place acres of new ideas. I had no single eureka moment that will forever change my life going forward. Disappointing, I know, but there it is. **2\. I’m not that important.** I often respond to email in the middle of dinner as if I’m a brain surgeon who must reply less people perish without my witty remarks. But not a single one of my followers online noticed. Get this, they apparently have their own lives and families and jobs. Turns out I’m not that important. **3\. I use work as my identity too much.** If you want to find out where you are placing your identity and self worth, stop doing something for 10 days and see if your soul pitches a fit. I’ve long known that workahol is a tonic I’m prone to imbibe, but I was not aware of how deep the addiction ran until I took some time away from email. **4\. I use my phone as a force field against the quiet.** If I get the slightest hint that I’m about to be faced with a quiet moment, I reach for my phone. Restaurant taking four minutes to seat us? Grab the phone! Going to the bathroom? Grab the phone! Red light? Grab the phone! Despite not having a big eureka moment of insight, I did find that small moments of quiet without a phone allowed small ideas to walk back into my head. **5\. I read more.** Instead of taking my phone to bed, I took a book to bed and ended up reading more. It’s hard to say if I had better sleep since we were in weirdo hotel beds with lumps and whatnot. I do know that I’ve never slept well when I bring my phone to bed though. I’ve never said, “Oh good, I looked at all my emails to create a list of things I failed to get done today. What a relaxing final thought as I drift into slumber.” **6\. I realized how many other people are on their phones.** When you take a break from your phone you get to judge other people who are on their phones. It’s delightful and also a little scary. At restaurants you can watch whole tables of people just stare at their phones, clumsily trying to stab food into their mouths without really looking up. If someone ever said to you, “Hey, want to go to a restaurant and not talk to each other?” You’d think that person was a bit of a lunatic, but that’s what we’re all doing these days. **7\. I don’t need a phone to hide from being present.** You can be perfectly absent without a phone. In the 1970s, parents would come home from work and hide behind newspapers. A dad would stroll in, put his hat somewhere (everyone wore hats in the 70s) and then disappear behind the day’s news. Hiding from the moment you’re in is not a phone problem, that’s a human problem. As I grabbed at anything I could find to distract myself (book, magazine, brochure about the country’s only underground zip line course) I realized fighting for silence is harder than I initially knew. I think I’d have a difficult time telling my grandfather, after he returned home from Germany fighting the Nazis in a tank, the tale of my 10-day exit from social media and email. He’d listen patiently while I extolled the many hardships I faced, because he was a kind man, but deep down I don’t think he would be that impressed. Be that as it may, I think I’m going to do it again. I might even get into a regular rhythm of taking some days off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tweet a link to this article and quietly wait for someone ignoring their dining companions at a restaurant to point out the irony of tweeting an article about not using social media. ### 5 Horrible Habits You Need to Stop Right Now  Do Not Email First Thing in the Morning or Last Thing at Night “The former scrambles your priorities and all your plans for the day and the latter just gives you insomnia,” says Ferriss, who insists “email can wait until 10am” or after you check off at least one substantive to-do list item. Chris Pecoraro—Getty Images  Do Not Agree to Meetings or Calls With No Clear Agenda or End Time “If the desired outcome is defined clearly… and there’s an agenda listing topics–questions to cover–no meeting or call should last more than 30 minutes,” claims Ferriss, so “request them in advance so you can ‘best prepare and make good use of our time together.'” Sam Edwards—Getty Images/Caiaimage  Do Not Check Email Constantly Batch it and check it only periodically at set times (Ferriss goes for twice a day). Your inbox is analogous to a cocaine pellet dispenser, says Ferriss. Don’t be an addict. Tools like strategic use of the auto responder and Boomerang can help. Jetta Productions—Getty Images  Do Not Carry a Digital Leash 24/7 At least one day a week leave you smartphone somewhere where you can’t get easy access to it. If you’re gasping, you’re probably the type of person that most needs to do kick this particular habit. by nacoki ( MEDIA ARC )—Getty Images/Flickr RF  Do Not Let People Ramble Sounds harsh, but it’s necessary, Ferriss believes. “Small talk takes up big time,” he says, so when people start to tell you about their weekends, cut them off politely with something like “I’m in the middle of something, but what’s up?” But be aware, not everyone agrees with this one (and certainly not in every situation), and you may want to pay particularly close attention to norms around chit chat when traveling internationally. Reza Estakhrian—Getty Images ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Welcome to Millennial Money Minute. My name is Taylor Tepper. And I'm Kara Brandeisky. And today we are talking about whether or not social media is the worst for your career. I think it's pretty terrible. I mean, basically I have to use Twitter and Facebook a lot because I'm a journalist and I need to build. Build up sources and I need to build of my brand. And that's sort of what's expected now of converged journalists. But it seems like people get into trouble all the time for jokes and comments that they think are innocuous, but they're actually offensive and kind of racist. And. [ MUSIC ] I'm terrified that eventually I will say something that is sort of off color or I'll make a joke that is not taken the way I meant it to be taken and my career will sort of go down hill and I will, and it will cause me a lot of problems, just because I wanted to spout out what? Some sort of. You know, joke that wasn't actually very funny. Why am I wrong? Why am I crazy to have this sort of fear? I mean I think it's pretty simple. You know, just don't be stupid before you tweet something. You know, think. Would I say this to my boss? Would I say this to my mom? And if the answer is no then you know maybe, maybe rethink that. And there's just so much good that comes from social media. You know you can just connect with people you normally wouldn't. you wouldn't be able to talk to. You can follow interesting people who have an interesting perspective on things. You can sort of join the conversation in your field, and that's all very positive, but you just have to remember, I mean, there's a reason why journalists have editors, and when you're self- publishing, you also have to be your own editor. Yeah, no, that's a fair point. But I feel like if you're just gonna be editing yourself the whole time, you're gonna come off kind of milquetoast, you're gonna come off kind of boring, you're gonna come off kind of not interesting, and it seems as if the people who have the biggest audience, who have the biggest brand, who have the most following, are people who are not. Boring and people who are interesting. So how, like, how do I do that? How do I become interesting, but not boring, but not say stuff that's offensive? Like what is like, what's, I feel like eventually I will slip. I just don't think that's true, you know. I just don't, I don't think that being offensive is the best way to gain followers. I don't think being offensive is interesting. Stain. I don't like following people who are just kind of obnoxious and provoking other people all the time. You know, I wanna follow people who are experts. I wanna follow people who have an interesting take on the news of the day. People who will break news and I just wanna be one of those kinds of people and that's not boring at all. No I agree and I don't want to be offensive the whole time either. [ LAUGH ] But, but and I agree with you also like you know it's really cool that I can like chat at. John Wall and that I can join in conversation about basketball and like wether or not this trade or that trade was good or not and I get instant analysis and that's all pretty cool but, it just kinda seems that the, the, the world your describing which I guess exists now seems exhausting like I have a full time job everyone you know people have full time jobs. People have wives, people have husbands, people have families. And it seems pretty terrible that I now am expected to work all day and also have a social media presence that is interesting but not offensive. And that just seems like a lot more of a burden to carry than I would have done. Time before all this stuff exploded. I mean, I think you're right, that it is exhausting, and there is a problem if you're trying to, you know, do your day to day job, and then go home at night, and like, build a personal brand. I think. They gets better to you know do the work and that have your work speaks for itself and have that communication on social media be part of the work that you do. It's obviously not that easy but. Yeah. I think that there's a lot of good and that you should be afraid. Right, and just don't be stupid. And don't be, don't be stupid. Don't be, that's, that's the take away. Don't be stupid, America. Until next time. 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