Shawn O'Hara: Welcome everyone. One of the topics or focus of this podcast is voluntary compliance, or the decisions, actions, commitments that people make in business and elsewhere. Today I have a different take on that. It is not directly business related. My guest today is Lacey Sheardown, and I will tell you her bio and a bit of her story. She is the General Manager of MeetEdgar, which is a leading social media management platform where she drives innovative strategies to empower creators and businesses to automate their social media content. She is a hockey mom with a passion for storytelling. She balances her professional expertise with an authentic family-focused presence on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. Recently Lacey embarked on a 30-day social media detox. She stepped away from the digital world to reset, reflect, and refine her approach to social media consumption, which ties in with the voluntary choices we make. Lacey did this strictly on her own, and today she will tell us her story. Welcome, Lacey.

Lacey Sheardown: Thanks for having me, Shawn. I am happy to be here.

Shawn O'Hara: What prompted your decision to quit social media?

Lacey Sheardown: You know, Shawn, it was not just one thing. It was a buildup, obviously, of years. Being a marketer for the last, well, 20 years, obviously I have been involved in social media since kind of day one. In the last, I would say more than a year, I had been spending a lot more time on my phone and what they call doom scrolling.

Lacey Sheardown: Even the content I was starting to receive on TikTok was telling me how I should not be on social media, yet I would still read about it on social media, which was ironic. I was noticing that it was affecting, at least I thought it was affecting, my mood and my patience. There was a day where I was looking at my screen time and really saw that it was disgustingly out of control. You try to keep your teenagers off social media, and then you look at your own consumption and realize you are worse than they are. I thought something needs to change.

Shawn O'Hara: Does this mean you were tracking your own time?

Lacey Sheardown: Yes. On an iPhone there is the screen time feature, and you can look at your time spent on different apps. It was embarrassingly high. I think at one point I tracked five hours for just social media apps a day. It is a lot. I was not sitting down and spending five-hour chunks, but every moment that I had free, I would reach for my phone.

Lacey Sheardown: I would be waiting for my bagel to pop out of the toaster and looking at my social media, or waiting for my coffee to brew and looking at my social media. It was all the time. I knew it was not good for me. The actual day that sparked the idea that maybe I should take a break had been building for a while. I kept thinking I should try to quit this bad habit.

Lacey Sheardown: The tough thing is, obviously as you introduced me, I work in social media. I am the General Manager of a social media scheduling platform. Part of the little voice in my head was going, "Well, you cannot leave it, Lacey, because this is your job too. You need to be aware of what is going on." That was the lie I kept telling myself the whole time: that I could not leave social media because I needed to know what was trending, I needed to get inspiration from it, and it was part of my job. That is why I was on it all the time.

Lacey Sheardown: I was talking with a coworker and I said, "I think I am going to just delete it all off my phone for the month of August." She said, "What?" I said, "I am just going to delete all the apps." It was never meant to be an upsell for MeetEdgar whatsoever, but MeetEdgar is a scheduling platform. I thought I could still schedule content from my desktop using MeetEdgar so that, from a business perspective, I was not just ghosting all my platforms and letting the engagement that I had built just die.

Lacey Sheardown: That was where the idea was born, and I had about three weeks to psych myself up for it. I think I thought of this in July and then thought, "Okay, August is the month I am going to do it."

Shawn O'Hara: How did your daily routine and habits change in that first week? What did you do when you were waiting for your bagel or brewing your coffee?

Lacey Sheardown: It actually changed from day one. The night before, on the last day of July, I had my 15-year-old daughter film me deleting all the social media apps off my phone because I was going to share that as content scheduled through MeetEdgar. The funny thing is I had to speed up the video because I had everything on there, even if I was not active in it. It was all stuff that I would check in on.

Lacey Sheardown: The very next morning, my daughter, who is a hockey player, wanted to start doing some training and was going to be going to the gym. I had to drive her, and I thought if I am driving her, I might as well go. Anyone who knows me personally knows I am not a gym person. I do not work out. I do not do very well in that area. The very next day, the first thing I did was put my phone across the room that night. It was not beside my bed. I was not going to use it as an alarm clock, which is a bad habit I was getting into because you reach over, turn off your phone, and then grab your phone.

Lacey Sheardown: The first thing I would do was look at email, Slack, and then social media before I would even get out of bed. I thought I could not do that because that was going to sink me. I used an old-fashioned alarm clock, put my phone across the room, and I got up that morning and drove my daughter to the gym at 5:30 in the morning, which was rough because I also do not wake up at that time. The morning was kind of like, okay, I had to take some preparation because if I had put my phone beside my bed, I probably would have looked for those apps even though they were not there.

Lacey Sheardown: I also did not want to start my day looking at Slack or email at 5:30 in the morning, so that helped me start the day off right. Later, when we got back and I was in the kitchen waiting for my coffee, I remember distinctly there were about three instances just in the morning where I picked up my phone to mindlessly check social and then went, "Right, I do not have it." I put it down. Each time I did it, it was kind of like, "Oh wow, I am addicted." I do not even use that word lightly. It is an addiction.

Lacey Sheardown: For the first little while I kind of felt almost smug and great about it. It gave me a little bit of a "Look at me, I have deleted social media from my phone and I am being really good," and I felt positive. Someone had told me you are on a bit of a high and feeling good the first week or so, and that it is a little further into it that you start to get the withdrawals. That is when you have that fear of missing out on things and even the connection you have with people because so much of our connection right now is online. We might not be seeing people in person, but we have this connection on social. After probably about two weeks, there was a deep missing-out feeling that kind of sunk in.

Shawn O'Hara: Two weeks. So that is when the withdrawal hit?

Lacey Sheardown: Yes, it was definitely a dip. I noticed at one point that another bad habit started to creep in. I was preparing for a trip, a birthday trip with some girlfriends, and I have a tendency to over-plan and prepare when it comes to themed things. There was a bit of a theme, so I found myself on this mission to online shop for the trip.

Lacey Sheardown: I did not see what I was doing at first. It was probably about a week, and then I was looking at my screen time again and realized that I had been replacing my doom scrolling time with searching for items for this trip. It had become my replacement, and probably not a great habit either. I did it for about a week before I realized what I was doing and went, "Oh, I have just swapped bad habits here."

Lacey Sheardown: I articulated that to some friends, and I think I even shared it on LinkedIn that I had done that. That alone just holds me accountable. Then I said, "Okay, I am stopping that too, because I do not need to now, instead of scrolling social media, start scrolling shopping sites and spending money."

Shawn O'Hara: That was on your phone?

Lacey Sheardown: Yes, that was on my phone.

Shawn O'Hara: I saw the post on LinkedIn too. When you first announced that you were giving it up, that caught my eye, and I thought, "Wow." That is why I started following.

Lacey Sheardown: It was not all easy.

Shawn O'Hara: It is not just the addiction to the social media itself. It is to something in these little powerful rectangles we carry around, these little boxes.

Lacey Sheardown: Honestly, Shawn, I feel like I might have even said this before, maybe to you in person, but I feel like they are pacifiers for adults. We all have them. If you drive by a bus stop, everybody has their heads down on their phone. If you are driving beside a bus and you look over, everyone has their head down on their phone. We do not know how to sit and be anymore.

Lacey Sheardown: I was getting a test the other day at the hospital, and I am totally fine, by the way, but I was in this waiting room with a bunch of other women. There were probably six of us. All the younger women had their heads down on their phones. I looked over and there was a lady who was more senior than me, and she was just sitting there, not with a phone, just looking around. I thought I was not going to go on my phone because here is this lady who had her head up and looked like she was ready to engage. I left my phone in my bag and made eye contact with her.

Lacey Sheardown: She made a small talk comment, and then I started chatting and we started chit-chatting. Slowly but surely, it was interesting, the other ladies kind of put down their phones and engaged too. She was obviously of a generation where she was not on her phone and was just waiting, looking around at pictures and whatnot. When I thought, "Okay, I will make eye contact," we had a really nice exchange, and that would not have happened if I had my phone in my hand.

Shawn O'Hara: I have noticed that. I have really tried to observe that when I am with somebody, if I have to reach for a phone for some reason, like to check an appointment or something that adds to the conversation, as soon as I touch mine, they will pick up theirs.

Lacey Sheardown: I have noticed that too. I do not even know if we are consciously going, "Oh, I have permission to do it." I think subconsciously we suddenly feel like it is our prompt to grab ours too.

Shawn O'Hara: Years ago I was reading about, I think it concerned the war in Iraq. There was an American officer who had been through quite a few battles, and he noticed a real difference in the troops. In his early days they did not have phones, so when they came back from a battle, they would actually bond, kind of do therapy and deal with each other, all his troops together, face-to-face talking. That really made the whole unit more cohesive.

Shawn O'Hara: He noticed that with phones, as soon as they are out of the battle and out of danger, they are all picking their phones up. They are not talking to each other, and they are just not as cohesive now as they were back then. I thought that was an interesting observation.

Lacey Sheardown: That is really interesting, and it is something we can all see. We all do it.

Shawn O'Hara: On the other side, what positive changes did you notice in your productivity, your mental health, your relationships, or anything besides the hospital visit?

Lacey Sheardown: That hospital visit was just a recent one. There were lots of changes right out of the gate. As I mentioned, I started going to the gym with my daughter. I did have the foresight to think, "Okay, what am I going to do to fill my time?" I had noted that I was spending up to five hours a day just on social media. I asked myself what I was going to do with this time that I was getting back in a positive way, for example, not online shopping.

Lacey Sheardown: I have been consistently going to the gym, which is really different for me. I have never been a gym person, so that has been a really good positive change. I notice I am sleeping better because I am not sitting there with my phone in my hand right before bed. That is what I was doing before. I was looking at my phone before bed. I would tell myself that I was just checking emails or just looking at my calendar for tomorrow, but I would eventually always scroll to TikTok, which was my biggest vice, then Instagram, then LinkedIn, probably in that order of my addiction.

Lacey Sheardown: I am definitely sleeping better. I also find, because I am not on it, I have much more patience for my kids. I have a little one as well. She just started kindergarten, and five-year-olds require a lot of patience, as you may know. I think I have a lot more patience and I am much more present, because I was doing things where I would be on my phone and she would be trying to get my attention. I would be impatient that someone interrupted me from what I was doing, even though it was something as unimportant as social media, but in my mind at the time, I could not see it. That has improved greatly.

Lacey Sheardown: There was also a time where I was filling the void by organizing things. I started going a little crazy organizing my sock drawer and my underwear drawer, and then I went into the bathroom and cleaned out a bunch of stuff. I thought, "If I am going to be super productive, I might as well go all in." I kind of overdid it the first week, and that has not occurred again. I was riding the high of getting rid of social media and filling it with all this productive stuff. I have been a little less intense about that since.

Lacey Sheardown: Honestly, it has made lots of positive impacts in my relationships. What I have been doing is telling people too. I have talked about it on social through scheduled posts or from my laptop, but people are going out of their way, like my family members in particular, to either direct message me or text me with pictures or whatever they are doing. That actually feels like a lot more of a sincere connection with them instead of just seeing it in my feed. They have purposely sent it to me, and I am purposely sending them something back. It feels more mindful.

Shawn O'Hara: It is like a direct connection instead of putting it out there for whoever. If you see it, you do. If you do not, fine. This is more targeted.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Did you find any difference in your concentration, thinking, or deep thinking? Any insights?

Lacey Sheardown: Definitely. I was a late diagnosis with ADHD. I was only diagnosed about two years ago. With that alone, social media can obviously be a landmine because it is a dopamine fix for people with ADHD. That is why we get stuck in this scrolling. It is not good for anyone's brain and certainly not great for someone with ADHD.

Lacey Sheardown: I have found that it has helped me be way more focused even during the workday. I was not scrolling social media during work, but it has longer-term effects. When I get up from my desk and take my phone to go get my coffee, I look at social and then come back. I am just consuming way too many different topics and switching channels in my brain to all these random different things that I probably do not need to know about during the day. It made me feel like I could step back and see more, but deeper, instead of the shallow version of switching channels every few moments.

Shawn O'Hara: I have been thinking about this quite a bit. Going to Europe is always a great example, going into some of the old towns and old churches and cathedrals, and realizing that way back, hundreds of years ago, people only even heard music maybe once a week when they went into church, unless it was something they did themselves. Then we moved through time to where we had TV and radio, which were always on. About 20 or 30 years ago, people were saying that in the early days people would read a newspaper, and now we are getting the equivalent of 114 newspapers every day.

Shawn O'Hara: Today that probably is in the thousands. When you scroll through, you see all of those potential stories, and our brains just are not wired to handle that continual overload.

Lacey Sheardown: It has been, especially in the beginning, almost peaceful. Not boring though. I do not think I ever felt bored. It just felt calmer.

Shawn O'Hara: More in touch that way.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: You mentioned people were sending you texts and so on, deliberately trying to reach you and communicate with you instead of just adding it on their feed. Was there anyone around you who was trying to get you to reverse your decision or draw you back into the way it used to be?

Lacey Sheardown: That is a great question. If I were to flat out say to one of them, "Oh, you are trying to get me back in," they would say, "No, no, no." But there were things that people do that I do not even think they are aware of that sort of try to undermine it. They would make comments about themselves because when you say, "This is what I am doing," they would respond, "Oh, well, I could never do that because I rely too much on social media for business," or, "I could never do that because I need to stay connected to my family," or, "I could never do that because..." all the reasons, even though I did not ask them why.

Lacey Sheardown: It is like they are trying to show me the reasons why I should stay with it too. Maybe me saying I am not going to do it makes them feel a little guilty about doing it, and they are trying to justify it. That was kind of the extent of it. I do not think anyone flat out said, "You should stay on social media. It is great for you." I think we all realize that this is probably going to be the smoking of our generation. Even though I work in social media, it is one of those things where it needs to be in moderation, and it needs to be mindful and purposeful.

Lacey Sheardown: It is when it becomes this doom scrolling, where what you thought was going to be minutes turns into hours of wasted time, that it is not healthy for anyone. More so what I got was only a few messages, but they still made me really happy. I had about three people I knew message me and say, "Hey, this is awesome. I am going to do this too. This is a great idea." I thought, "Wicked. Good luck. I feel great. You should. This is wonderful."

Lacey Sheardown: It made me really happy to hear that a couple of people were inspired or prompted to reflect on their own social media consumption and let go of it for a while too, if not longer. I also heard stories from people who had changed their habits or do not consume social media in the same way that most of us do. People told me about products like "the brick" that turns your phone into something that hard locks your phone. People were telling me about the other things that they have done to curb their social media consumption.

Lacey Sheardown: It was great. There are a lot of people who are recognizing that this is not a great idea and that we need to do something to be healthier about the way we participate. I absolutely think there is value in being involved in social media when it comes to connecting with your family and friends, and especially if you are in business. It is essential for marketers. But do marketers need to be consuming five hours of social media a day? No. That is not helpful.

Shawn O'Hara: Your audience may be on there that long, but they cannot control that. I was thinking of the tie-in you mentioned to smoking. I was also thinking of casinos and bars. They have their message about "gamble responsibly" or "drink responsibly," and maybe it is along the same lines, or like no smoking zones. We can still smoke somewhere, but just in designated areas. We can go to the casinos but be mindful of what we are doing.

Lacey Sheardown: I agree. A lot of pleasure and a lot of great inspiration does come out of social media for sure. I think it is something where everybody should take a step back and look at their own consumption and maybe see what they can change and how they can do that. The thing I would do differently going into it is be a little bit more prepared.

Lacey Sheardown: I had thought about it three weeks before, but I did not do much planning other than the day before, where I said, "Okay, tomorrow I am not going to put my phone beside my bed to wake up, and I am going to go to the gym." That was the extent of my plan, plus deleting the apps. I knew that I was going to use MeetEdgar to schedule my work content from my laptop. But I think going into it again, I would do a little bit more pre-planning and do all those things that I did then, plus more.

Lacey Sheardown: I might also plan other activities for the times when I would have been using social media, or bring in a bit more of a support network in person. I talked about it on LinkedIn and I talked about it on Instagram, which is ironic because that is where I was trying to stay away from. Of course, I was using MeetEdgar from my laptop, not my phone. I think I would have set up some walks with friends or planned out things that were really positive and kind of little rewards, if you will, for staying off social media.

Shawn O'Hara: For human interaction.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes, because at the heart of it, that is what I was trying to get back in touch with.

Shawn O'Hara: What other advice would you give for people considering doing something similar?

Lacey Sheardown: So many people think it is so hard and that they could not do it. Honestly, as I said, the first week was almost euphoric. It is actually much easier than you think it is. It is very easy to give up at the beginning. The hard part, like I said, was at about two or three weeks when there is a bit of a dip and you are not feeling so great about it, and you are starting to itch and miss that interaction. That is when it gets hard.

Lacey Sheardown: The first step is really easy, and it literally just involves deleting the apps off your phone. That is it. I had those timers set on my phone that would pop up with a daily limit of 15 minutes per app, and they would pop up and I would just hit the ignore button. They are very easy to dismiss. They meant nothing to me. I think you really have to take that step and just delete them from your phone.

Lacey Sheardown: If you still need to be in touch, like some people who use Facebook Messenger almost like texting, where it might be a communication method, just keep that on your laptop or on your computer. Then you are using it at specific times and it is not this mindless consumption. That is the part I think we all want to avoid.

Shawn O'Hara: The default that we go to.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: It is interesting, thinking about the addiction angle and avoiding alcohol. With Alcoholics Anonymous and people who get a support network, if it is midnight and they are craving a drink, they can message their support network and say, "I am really desperate." That may not work the same way for social media because they would go on social media to say, "I am trying to stay off." They might need something else.

Lacey Sheardown: Certainly, or even just someone via text, off social media, or picking up the phone. That is something we do not do as much. I am Gen X, so we still pick up the phone occasionally, but younger people, like my oldest daughter who is 23, if you ask her to make a phone call, her face just goes white. She does not want to make a phone call. She wants to text. "Why would I have to phone?" So maybe phoning someone would be helpful too.

Lacey Sheardown: Another thing is just going for walks. My dog really benefited from it too. He got a lot more walks.

Shawn O'Hara: What about you? Your consumption is less than most, is it not?

Shawn O'Hara: Yes, it is. When I had to reset and wipe out my phone, I did not put Facebook back on. I do have LinkedIn, and I use that to message, mainly because I find it smoother than the desktop version to be able to message. I use WhatsApp so that I am reachable, but a good chunk of the time my phone is on either Do Not Disturb mode or airplane mode. I have an Android. Right now it is on airplane mode, so nothing is coming through, and email is closed. Everything is closed, so there are absolutely no distractions that are going to pop up here.

Shawn O'Hara: I do find, though, that just being on it, I can access my files. Just being on it, I can find it hard to put down, or I might rearrange my calendar or plan things out, but I am still on the device instead of putting it down.

Lacey Sheardown: There are other things I have been doing with my phone too. I did find myself at one point, now that you bring it up, going through and deleting old photos. I had seen something on social before I quit about an interesting way to keep your photos organized. On whatever day you are on the calendar, say today is October 24th, you go into your photos and search "October 24." All the photos ever taken on any year on October 24 come up.

Lacey Sheardown: You can go down a trip down memory lane and also delete duplicates or ones that are similar but you do not need. I was doing that, which was fun, but it was also just time on my phone that did not need to be spent. I am trying to find other things. Right now my daughter and I are actually going through her Lego. She has two older sisters' worth of Lego and a few sets that she has acquired. You get those sets, they build them, and then they just get taken down and thrown into one giant box.

Lacey Sheardown: We are at that stage where we have this giant box of Lego and I am thinking this is crazy. There must be thousands of dollars' worth of Lego here. We are trying to organize the Lego. That is what we are doing in our spare time. We have it dumped out all over this one area, and we are color-coding. We are finding all the books, and I am searching online for all the old building instructions, and we are trying to sort out a lot of Lego.

Lacey Sheardown: I should probably take some pictures of it. It is fascinating. It sounds kind of boring, but I am finding it very therapeutic, rummaging through the sound of the Lego as you put your hands through it and finding the right pieces. When you finally find it, it is even more satisfying than puzzling when you find that right piece. It is something my daughter and I can do together. She is five, so it is nice that we are doing that, because I am also trying to get her away not from social media, but from just wanting to watch Netflix or something.

Shawn O'Hara: It is really good because that is incredibly interactive. I love Lego. I had it as a child and I have used it quite a bit. I actually know two people who do Lego therapy, so if you ever wanted to get rid of your collection, they might be interested, because they will go to places like garage sales and so on just to build their collection.

Lacey Sheardown: Interesting. Okay, cool. I am getting quite into it.

Shawn O'Hara: There are fascinating exercises that Lego therapists do, to have people go in and build and find things and so on.

Lacey Sheardown: Maybe I have just stumbled on this accidentally and I did not even realize there was Lego therapy.

Shawn O'Hara: They are certified.

Lacey Sheardown: Excellent.

Shawn O'Hara: It is also interesting when we relate to what some would call busy work compared to being truly productive. We can do things like that. I have thought about that too. There are so many photos, even physical photos that we have inherited, that we could go through, and we could do a lot, but it becomes busy work and not that 2% or that 20% that we need to do each day to really move forward in a productive manner to be effective at what we are doing.

Lacey Sheardown: Agreed. That is a whole other topic. I would like to know what we are doing with all these digital photos to pass them on.

Shawn O'Hara: Yes.

Lacey Sheardown: That is a whole other thing I would love to explore: what people are doing with all the photos we have on our devices, and how those get passed on to people. I like an old-fashioned photo book. I have not done one in a long time, but I am thinking about how to produce or create some in a way that is a nice keepsake.

Shawn O'Hara: To actually go through and have them printed.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes, because a lot of what I am doing with Instagram, or what I have done with it, is just one giant digital photo album. It is a memory thing. Sometimes I will say to people, "Did you see my Halloween costume from four years ago?" and then I go look it up. It is this storage of photographs. I am wanting to know how to get those out of there in a way that I can create books.

Shawn O'Hara: In a platform that we control, because we do not control that platform. If that gets wiped out, everything goes. That is the interesting part too. Will we, through some disaster or whatever, lose 20 or 30 years of our lives and our history, compared to an album we have from when we were kids or that our parents have?

Lacey Sheardown: I just turned the big 5-0, and one of my aunts took that opportunity to send me all the physical photographs my mom had shared with her over the years of me as a kid. She said, "Here, I thought you might want these." It was the coolest card to receive for my birthday. These were physical photos that I do not have copies of because it was the one photo taken of me when I was four years old, and then my mom gave it to my aunt. It was really neat to have them back and to show my kids.

Shawn O'Hara: We have some going back generations, where we see some family resemblance. Some of them we do not even know who the people are. We just know they look like us.

Lacey Sheardown: It is cool.

Shawn O'Hara: They are relatives.

Lacey Sheardown: I love that.

Shawn O'Hara: Way back in the days before social media. You did the detox in August, and now, when we are recording this, we are at the end of October. What else has happened that has been a permanent lifestyle change for you?

Lacey Sheardown: I have kept all the apps off except, I will admit, Instagram. My justification for putting Instagram back on my phone is that my 15-year-old, who is the hockey player, has gone away to boarding school to play hockey. Anyone who has a teenager knows they are notoriously terrible for keeping in touch. Her school and her hockey program take photos and videos and post them all the time of what is going on at the school and in the hockey program. I put Instagram back on my phone for that purpose, to keep an eye on that feed.

Lacey Sheardown: I found it really interesting in that I do catch myself going to look and I will search her school, and I see the thing that I am looking for, but then I find my thumb scrolling. I am catching myself really quickly and saying, "No, I do not want to be doing this," and I put it down. It is just very easy to get caught back up in it. LinkedIn I have been using from my desktop, which keeps that much more purposeful as well.

Lacey Sheardown: I want to feel like I am in control of how I am using social media and when I am on it. When I am looking at my daughter's school's content, I see even more now how these apps have been designed to be addictive. They want you on there. They are giving you more stuff that they know will be appealing to you or will get some kind of reaction out of you. It is either going to be content you love or content that gets under your skin. They want you to either like and share it, or they want you to comment and be upset about it and interact in that way.

Lacey Sheardown: I am much more aware of it now, and I see it from a bit of an outside lens instead of just being in it blindly, which I really appreciate. I am not going to put TikTok back on my phone. I do not know if you have gone down the TikTok rabbit hole, but that algorithm is unbelievably addictive. The amount of content they share with you and how quickly you scroll through it, with content switching within three seconds, is not good. Your brain feels scrambled after you have been on it.

Shawn O'Hara: I have not gone the TikTok or the Instagram route because I can sense the ability to be addicted. Even Facebook, I have found that if I click on some things, I end up in a whole different algorithm. It will show me a lot more content along the same lines, and that is part of the addiction.

Lacey Sheardown: It takes you down a whole other rabbit hole. TikTok is great for that. You are shown something and even if you spend a split second too long on it, somehow TikTok knows, and then they start serving you more of that. It will take you down sometimes bizarre paths where you are thinking, "I do not even know why it thinks I like this." I do not recommend it to anyone. If you have avoided it this long, please continue to do so.

Shawn O'Hara: I find the same with Facebook when I am on that too.

Lacey Sheardown: The funny thing is, I stopped using Facebook two or three years ago because I was finding that my algorithm and whatever people were posting within my feeds became so argumentative and not why I originally was part of the Facebook community. I made a status that said, "Find me on Instagram. I am sort of not participating anymore." I still have the account live, but I do not share anything to it and I do not go in it. The only Facebook thing I really use is Messenger, because it is a great way to stay in touch with people overseas.

Shawn O'Hara: Different people use different platforms too, which is interesting. My customer relationship management system has a feature where I can select how people like to stay in touch. I know somebody where we can text, use WhatsApp, email, or LinkedIn. She ignores all of those, but if I reach her on LinkedIn, I usually get a response within 15 minutes. It is about knowing how to reach people.

Lacey Sheardown: Is that not the truth?

Shawn O'Hara: Yes. With Messenger I rarely have more than some family members using it. This has been quite fascinating.

Lacey Sheardown: I am glad. What I find interesting too, Shawn, is that when I did it, I did not think it would be that interesting. I was not doing it for that purpose. It was really just for myself. I have had quite a few conversations now with different folks about it, and the fact that it is even an interesting topic makes me think about how collectively we can step back from this and get our social media under control again.

Lacey Sheardown: Part of me wishes there was an app, and it would make no money, that was just people you are friends with, with their content given to you in chronological order with no other suggested content. Just whoever you are following, in the order it was posted, in a simple feed. You would be able to scroll it in moments, catch up with whatever happened today with your network, and be done with it.

Shawn O'Hara: Maybe that is a separate Slack channel. With my family, I have Slack on my phone and it is strictly for family. They will post things.

Lacey Sheardown: Your immediate family?

Shawn O'Hara: My immediate family, yes. It tends to be questions or content so we see what is happening with them. It is very individualistic for us and also more personal.

Shawn O'Hara: One of my daughters posted this week. She was driving and she saw movement above her head, and there was a huge spider on the sun visor. She had to pull over. She took pictures and posted them in Slack. She was all right. She did not drive off the road or anything, but that became a very personal thing between all of us, and we were able to comment.

Lacey Sheardown: I like that.

Shawn O'Hara: Your circles do not need to be huge. Your networks do not need to be huge and far-reaching. It is about genuine connection.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Lacey, this has been fascinating. How can people connect with you, either personally or for MeetEdgar, to find out more about that or just to carry on the conversation about giving up social media?

Lacey Sheardown: The best way is probably my LinkedIn, because I do still look at it through my desktop, so it is just Lacey Sheardown. I think I am the only one, so I am easy to find. That is a great way to get in touch with me. I am obviously posting about MeetEdgar there too, so they can see links through to MeetEdgar if anybody is interested in learning more about that.

Lacey Sheardown: I think the final piece that I would say to people, and I kind of said it before, is that the first step is so easy. Even just try it for a day. If you like that, do it the next day. It does not have to be a permanent thing. Give it a month and see what changes come for you too that you might want to hold onto.

Shawn O'Hara: A camping trip or something came to mind when you said, "Give it a day," somewhere where there is no coverage.

Lacey Sheardown: I'm hoping I can do a grownup camp in the summer where adults could go. Our phones are taken away, we get to go rowing and we go hiking and we, you know, do all the things that you would do at summer camp except not stay in tents. I think it would be great experience, kind of like a Gen X summer camp where we have to listen to tape cassettes and not have the Internet for five days or something. It sounds magical to me.

Shawn O'Hara: Our lives would go on. We could all manage like that.

Lacey Sheardown: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: This has been fascinating. Thanks for being on our podcast.

Lacey Sheardown: Thanks for having me.

Shawn O'Hara: And that is a wrap.

Links

Lacey Sheardown on LinkedIn

MeetEdgar