Just Use the Website

For many years, I’ve heard recommendations from privacy-conscious individuals that if you choose to be on a social media platform, it’s best to just use the web interface, and not an app. That limits the ability of the company that runs the service to track and log data about you. Sometimes I’ve followed this advice, and sometimes I haven’t, depending on my perceived convenience of the app over the website.

However, recently I’ve begun limiting my app usage more and more, but not necessarily for privacy reasons. Rather, I’ve found that it’s easier to avoid mindless swiping or the nervous tick of looking for something to do on my phone if I limit those types of interactions to only the respective website. My (phone) screen time has dropped, and I don’t catch myself wasting as much time on my mobile device as I once did. I’ve actually gone so far as to not even use the mobile website, but only check certain things when in front of my home desktop, which has further helped to reduce the amount of time I waste during the day.

Anyhow. Hopefully that idea is useful to someone else, or to my future self when I’m reviewing this. I’m sure there are more ways to improve what I focus on and spend my time doing. If I find another that seems to stick for me, I’ll pass it along.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload (Day 48/100). You can join in yourself by visiting https://100DaysToOffload.com.