For the past few months, I’ve been feeling information overload from tons of emails, phone notifications, podcasts, blog posts, learning apps, books I haven’t read, as well as social media apps.
I realized that Facebook was adding stress to my life, each time I wanted to post something I was thinking twice about it and I was also spending lots of time in the app. So, I decided to clean my Facebook contact list as well as the Pages I liked. I removed around 250 contacts and kept around 170.
A while ago, I read about Dunbar’s number, which according to Wikipedia “Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.“
So, I guess 170 is closer to 150, and yes, I feel more relaxed after I cleaned my contact list.
These are some lessons I’ve learned, review your contact list and pages you follow and ask yourself these questions:
- Is this person/page helping me be a better person?
- How do I feel when I see the posts from this person/page?
- Am I learning something from this person/page?
- Is this person going to be happy for me if I share some accomplishment?
- Is there a better way to be in contact with this person/follow this page? Maybe it’s better to be in contact with them with a phone call or through a messaging app, Twitter, Instagram or a blog post feed.
One thing I have learned is to not add coworkers to my Facebook account, that doesn’t mean I don’t have good friends that started as coworkers, but I have learned that it is better to add them after we no longer work together. Why is this?
- You might find out that your coworkers got together and you were not invited. You could start stressing about why you were not invited.
- You post something and someone might not like it and this creates problems at work.
For Pages, I used to follow lots of Pages about companies I like and Pages that post about travel ideas. I’ve seen that there are many good pages with good content, but I’m trying to minimize the pages I follow to only those where I’ve identified that I like the majority of the content, and to only those pages that are teaching me about a topic I’m currently learning about. I wish there was a way to like a Page but not follow it, and only enable the follow when I’m ready to learn about that topic. Maybe there is a way and I haven’t found it yet?
Your social networks can help you grow only if you make sure you are following the right people, and they can be a source of connection, support and learning.
Arabela Navarro 