How I Made Social Media Work for Me Again

There is a growing emphasis on having offline hobbies, and I am all for that. Being online all the time is not good for us, and we all know the reasons why. But ​remembering the benefits of the offline life doesn’t mean you have to shun social media. However it does mean that it’s likely a worthwhile exercise to find what your approach intentional consumption is. My approach is to tie what I learn on social media into my note-taking practices.

Social media has always been a real catalyst of this for me. In fact, everything I ever learned about notes or PKM started on PKM Twitter in 2021, and now I work in the industry, meaning Twitter literally changed my life. So because of how great social media has been for me, I've decided against a blanket removal of it from my life (I tried that briefly and I didn't like it one bit), but I am interested in intentional practices around my social media usage. My practices give me a way forward when I feel overwhelmed with information, or if I feel there is just too much to read, or if I am being heavily influenced by something I had no need for 5 minutes ago.

So what are these practices? Today I'll talk about 3.

1. TikTok Bookmark review

2. Resonance Filter with Raindrop

3. Meta-narratives

All these practices centre around the idea of research as a hobby or a life practice. I’ve found it teaches me as much about the world as it teaches me about myself, and that combination keeps me coming back every day. Crucially, these practices also allow me to do something with the information I've saved or indicated interest in. It moves from passive scrolling to active learning and thinking, but on my own terms through some really fun practices.

Let's explore :)

TikTok Bookmark review

TikTok is far and away my favourite social media. The range of different voices, opinions and ideas I have come across since I downloaded it in the early days of Lockdown is honestly immeasurable. But let's be real, if I'm scrolling TikTok, I'm bored, looking for stimulation or just trying to passively pass the time. Frankly, when I come across these fabulous voices and ideas, I am not in the place to listen to them and act on them, because for me "action" translates to note-taking, so I just bookmark it in TikTok. I have 374 saved right now, and I can’t wait to slowly dig into them.

I do this on evenings and weekends, bit by bit. I browse through to see what’s interesting me at the time, listen, take notes and reflect on what I've heard. I connect it to other notes I have, I go back to TikTok, like the video to say thank you, un-bookmark it, and repeat.

This essentially gives me my own feed where everything is interesting. I spend hours doing this and I love it so much.

Resonance Filter

This is my longest standing practice and it's my favourite. I collect things from all across the internet that interest me, and they sit in my Raindrop Unsorted folder until I’m ready to look into them. I try to go through my bookmarks every weekend.

There's no pressure to clear this 'Unsorted' folder to 0. The point is just to see what resonates when I have my laptop open. Whatever that is goes into Capacities and I work on it. I archive it after (as you can see from the 4200 bookmarks I've archived since 2021). I have a full walkthrough of this elsewhere.

This practice solves a few issues

1. Not everything I find interesting for a fleeting second needs to go into my note-taking app. I found I was just moving fleeting interests into there rather than taking notes on it, which... is kinda the whole point

2. It's quiet, it's mine. There isn't an algorithm competing for my attention here. There are no ads. It's just me hanging out with whatever past me found interesting.

3. It's unified. I don't have 3000 tabs open, I don't have a million screenshots of things I want to buy/remember and I don't have to read every tweet/comment/article post in depth right as I see it for the first time. It's an inbox of intention, where my intention is to engage with what I read/see on socials, it's how I can develop my own opinions. To do that I first have to capture that interest the second it hits into Raindrop, and then I return to Raindrop in my own time and dig in.

Weave it all into a narrative

The outcomes of the first two practices are more notes in Capacities. One day in March I decided to look at all the notes I created in a week and write about what they meant collectively. Why was I savings what I was saving? What did it mean? What actions did I take as a result?

I enjoyed the process so much, I started doing it weekly, I call them meta-notes. I find it so fun, and incredible to witness my thinking evolve. It's deeply personal and an excellent reflective practice.

The rule is simple, all items collected in a week must be linked in this meta-page. Here's a small snippet of one.

It's really nice to see all the different strands of my interests come together. It's essentially another form of journalling for me, but through the traces of my interests, largely sparked by social media. I love this practice.

Conclusion

I get social media to work for me through intentional consumption, curation and engagement with the things that give me pause. I reflect on everything too, which deepens the intentionality further. Together, I find this is research into the world and myself that feels like a hobby. I stay connected on social media, I broaden my horizons but on my own terms, and process everything in my calm and safe note-taking app. ​I highly recommend it!