How many hours do you spend searching the web for information? Scrolling through pages of google results, and, if you’re a researcher or student, the university library portal, caught in a never ending rabbit hole of information and questions, and more questions. Or, maybe you spend hours thumbing through your social feeds, watching videos, consuming content, and grow frustrated with yourself when you realise you’ve wasted time.
Well, that’s me.
If you’ve read my last post, “Busy Bee: Remembering What University Entails”, you’ll have learned that I’m a crippling overachiever—at least, I think I am—and how I always feel the need to prove my place and worth. Typically, this results in hours and days sucked into the vacuum of a blackhole of information, and means my time management skills require work. But, often, I waste time on non-academic things, too, like doomscrolling through Instagram, binging Youtube videos, and clicking my way through Pinterest boards. It’s a bad habit. One that keeps me in bed longer than I need to be, and becomes a crutch for an overly stimulated mind. Yet, more often than not, it’s an intentional deep-dive to inform myself of strategies and practices that can help advance my career goals that turns south pretty quickly.
To write online, for clients, for publishers, even for yourself, favours those with a social media presence and an established loyal following. Scratch that! To have a successful writing career in today’s age, favours those who know how to network and market themselves, and social media plays a key role. As an introvert, who’d rather disconnect from social media for wellness reasons, loathes being that person who’s always on about what they do, bombarding people until it seems like a nuisance, well, it sparks a thread of anxiety in me.
So, I turn to others who established themselves with blogs, published books, and have made writing a profitable career for themselves. There’s plenty that turns up, a lot of which helps greatly, but the majority of the tips, and tricks, and “10 Ways to Start an Author’s Blog”, prove fruitless. Blogs upon blogs, youtube channels, and instagram posts, all repeat the same content featured on another blog or channel, resemble each other, and create courses for information they learned from another blog. There’s an abundance of information out there, and most of it is repetitive—same content, same style, same appearances. Not many tell a story, or offer something else for a change.
Weeding through this repetition for information that goes beyond the obvious is frustrating. Trying to stay true to myself and not be a nuisance as I consider some of these methods, proves difficult and isolating. It’s easier to mimic the others, but it’s a fake-ness that comes with social media, and one I’m not willing to take part in.
I’ve reclaimed my mornings. Set timers on my phone that limit access to all of my apps, and stop me from seeing what others are doing. And as a way to resolve my lack of guidance when it comes to setting up my career, I’ve signed up for a professional course that’s helping establish my values in the online world, while simultaneously staying true to myself. I don’t have to be that person who bombards others with the same information, voice and style. But I do need to be myself.
