I’m participating in the 31 Days to Reset Your Life program at Happy Black Woman. The program is designed to help you evaluate your goals and priorities and think of them in the context of your life today and how you might be able to refocus on what’s important. Read on to learn about my experience with the challenge!
Today’s activity was to cut the negative people out of your life. This is something I spent a lot of time focusing on around eight years ago, and I would say looking at my friend base now, I did a pretty good job of it. I always make a conscious effort to spend time only with people who invigorate me, give me hope, and simply make me happy.
One area I’m not so good with is on the internet. I’ve friended people on Facebook simply because they sent a request and followed people on Twitter because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Well there’s no denying that I spend a good amount of time on Facebook and Twitter, so I decided to take that piece of advice from Rosetta and work on that today.
Facebook has a feature that I haven’t paid much attention to until now, and it was perfect for today’s exercise. For each of your friends, there are three levels of “subscription” you can have – you can opt to view only important activity, most activity, or all activity. You can also unsubscribe to see updates from someone altogether. Even within that, you can choose which type of updates you want to see (about life, etc), but I didn’t go that far.
I simply went down my news feed and for about 80% of people I switched the setting from most updates to only important updates. For people I don’t feel a strong connection to, or who I was close with in the past but don’t necessarily want to dwell on memories about, I either unsubscribed to their updates or unfriended them altogether. And my close friends I subscribed to all updates.
Now all this Facebook speak really has me sounding kind of silly. Even my boyfriend and accountability partner was skeptical. But I feel strongly that the time I put in to this will make me happier. I have removed the reminders of things about my past I don’t want to dwell on. And I have highlighted friends who I love and give me life. A byproduct of this is also that I will have less updates, so hopefully I won’t waste so much time online.
Next will be to unfollow people on Twitter. I hope to do this soon. But I wanted to focus on Facebook first because there are more emotions attached to it. Whether we like it or not, our emotions are wrapped up in the online world. We might as well take control.
-N.C.