Unplugging

When to put down the phone

Social media can be a wonderful tool for connecting with people, sharing content, and raising awareness for your brand. But what do you do when you need a break?

Planning ahead makes all the difference. My boyfriend has a freelance photography business, and he relies almost entirely on social media to recruit clients. So when we took a recent vacation to the Rocky Mountains, he naturally wanted to share every moment with his followers. But what is a trip to one of the most beautiful places in the world if you are glued to your phone, waiting for Instagram to load?

Instead, we made sure to take lots of photos on the way, and we archived them. Too many photos posted at once can clog up photo streams anyway, and you don’t want to lose followers. We allowed ourselves to enjoy the beauty of the outdoors, capturing the moments without getting distracted by who had posted a recent story. Unplugging can be refreshing; don’t ruin it by constantly refreshing your phone.

Once we made it back to the car at the trailhead, we unleashed a few photos and stories into our social accounts, and still got plenty of impressions. Now we have an archive of content from that trip that we can use in the future, plus actual memories of our time in the mountains together. 

How do you unplug and relax without wasting opportunities to create content?