Taming Your Use of Social Media

Does the allure of social media control your life or have you harnessed its power to serve you? This week, I'm Todd Rhoades, and I'm wrapping up our deep dive into deep work by confronting a formidable foe that threatens our focus: the relentless pull of social media. In our candid discussion, we peel back the layers of this modern distraction and examine its impact on church leaders and staff. It's startling to realize that with millions plugged into these platforms, we're all too often unwittingly sacrificing valuable time that could be spent on the work that truly fulfills us.

Join me as we explore the nuances of digital interactions that seduce us with dopamine hits from likes and comments, often blurring the lines between building meaningful relationships and falling into the trap of self-promotion. Our conversation ventures into the rarely discussed effects of social media on theology and church leadership and challenges the notion of whether these platforms genuinely foster connection or simply feed into the temptation of building personal empires. As we conclude this series, I urge you to reflect on your social media usage and consider how it may be steering you away from the essential, demanding, and rewarding work within the church.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom. Thanks for joining us today. We've been in a series this week about deep work and the difference between deep work and shallow work. I hope, if you haven't listened to earlier this week and the podcast episodes, I hope you'll go back and catch up, because today what we want to do is round out our week on talking about deep work with kind of one of the biggest culprits, that one of the biggest things that keep us from deep work at least for many of us, myself included and that's social media. And we're going to talk just really briefly It'll be a short one today on how to tame your use of social media.

Speaker 1: 0:54

The real question here and when I phrase it like this, it's convicting, at least for me Does social media rule you or do you rule social media? And many times for me personally, I find that social media rules me more than I rule social media. So social media is a huge thing. 235 million Americans, 235 million of us, are on social media and globally, the average time spent on social media per day is about two hours and 24 minutes, according to a recent study, and it's really turned in for a lot of us to be an addiction. We are addicted not only to social media, but to our phones, and here's the problem, though and this isn't rocket surgery. It can be a huge time waster, and it's all because of something called dopamine. Whenever that, whenever you get a reply or a like or anything like that, you get this little. Your brain gets this little chemical impulse that just makes you feel good, and that's the dopamine. It can be a huge distraction, though, and a huge time waster.

Speaker 1: 2:06

When we're talking about social media, how many times do you just look up? You go, maybe your research and sermon or something, and you go to look up something, and then, an hour later, you find somehow you got on Facebook, or you got on X or or somewhere, and you look up and you're like where did that hour go? That's an hour of my life I'll never get back. It will color your mind, and that's one of the negative things about social media is not only the amount of time that we spend on it where did that hour go? But it can also color your mind. It can color your mind on theology, it can color your mind on other church leaders and, let's be honest, we as church leaders, as pastors and church leaders, we have our own little kind of pools that we weighed in in social media.

Speaker 1: 2:55

We're checking out to see what's the latest Andy Stanley controversy, who's the latest guy or gal that's taken a fall and what's their story and what's the dirt, what kind of controversies going on. What's going on? What's your Southern Baptist? What's what the world's going on with the SBC today? What lawsuits are happening, who's dissing who? All those kind of things are not only do they waste our time, but they color your mind, because the internet is not just a great place on.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Social media is not a great place to have uplifting, generosity type discussions. They are usually very angry people that we like to. Even maybe you were taking that anger and that posting, but a lot of times, if you're me, you just you enjoy reading it. It's enjoyable to read, but it can be a huge time waster and it can color your mind. One of the reasons that people say that they need to be on social media, facebook or whatever is that it builds relationships. But does it really? I've seen many pastors that are very into social media, but the temptation to them is and they might not even admit this, but the temptation is to build their own platform to make themselves look better, and that's a real temptation for those of us in church leadership. So you really have to be careful about that. But here's the biggest thing I think that is a detriment of social media is because you know we've talked this week about how your church is some, how your work in church work is is some of the most difficult work in the world, some of the most important work in the world and some of the most fulfilling work in the world. But social media can really take your eye off the ball. Social media is really to tie all this back in. It's the enemy of deep work. So here's what I want you to think about as you close out your week and as you're hopefully getting arms around leaning into some of this deep work that I've been challenging you to do.

Speaker 1: 4:58

If your social media usually just out of control, today's the day to do something about. It's going to be hard. You're going to have withdrawal symptoms, but it's really the first step in recognizing that it's a problem. Let me just say this if you find that social media is one of one of your favorite things to do. It's a problem and if you're spending too much time on it, it's probably taking away the best part of your day. It's taking your eye off the ball and one of the most important things is that's keeping you that shallow work, if it's. If you get even call work, the shallow activity of social media is taking your eye off the ball and keeping you from the deep work. So consider an app they're available for both Apple and Android phones apps like Moment or App Detox for Android that will help you set up rules and will log violations if you have violations about going over time and consider I've done this.

Speaker 1: 6:00

I don't do it as often as I should. But consider a social media detox, maybe 30 days or maybe even easier, and this is what I do. I try to do as much as I can. Take one day off a week at least, maybe during your Sabbath if you're not doing a Sabbath, boy, I need to do better with that but you need to try and do a Sabbath if you can. But maybe taking a day off of social media, even a day off from your phone, for one day a week, would really benefit you, not only to clear your mind, to keep your eye on the ball rather than off the ball, but also to get you more excited about doing some of this deep work that we've talked about.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Hey, I would love to hear your comments and your thoughts on this whole series on deep work. What did you think of Cal Newport's book and what did you think of this podcast? I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to me anytime at podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. That's podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. I'd love to hear from you. Tell me who you are, where you live, how you listen, how you found us. Tell me your life story. I would love to read it. Alright, hope you have a great weekend and we'll be right back here on Monday with more of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.