Can I Become More Productive Within a Month Without TikTok?

TikTok is arguably one of the most popular social networks at present, with millions of users posting and watching short-form videos every day. 

It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but after much thought and reflection, I realised that I wasn’t being as productive as I should have been. On top of that the platform simply did not align with my priorities.

That’s why despite its popularity I decided to deactivate both of my accounts as an experiment to see if I would become more productive within a month. 

In this blog post, I will share the reasons why I decided to delete my TikTok account and how it has impacted my life so far.

What Led Me To The Decision? 

As a part-time content creator with a full-time 9 to 5 job as well as other priorities on top of that, it can sometimes be hard to find the time to create content. 

That’s why a few days ago I decided to sit down and reflect on what I was doing that affected my productivity in some way. I literally got a piece of paper and wrote down all the tasks that I do every day and I crossed out all the tasks that are either not important to me or are wasting time.

Among the tasks I’ve crossed out, there were other things such as spending a long time on Reddit or needlessly checking my emails on several occasions throughout the day. But the one thing that stood out was TikTok.

I discovered that I was spending way too much time on that platform and whenever I had a few minutes spare, I would needlessly scroll through hundreds of videos that weren’t actually benefiting me in any way, shape or form.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing creators on the platform, many of which I still follow on other platforms, but I found that it was becoming too much of a distraction in my daily life. 

That’s why I decided to do an experiment, I haven’t fully deleted my accounts, I just deactivated them and deleted the app from my phone to see if I could become more productive and I’ve given myself a month to try this out.

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3 Days Later…

It’s been 3 days since I deactivated my TikTok accounts and I’ve already seen an improvement, for starters, I no longer watch TikToks before I go to sleep which in return has improved my sleep as I’m going to bed earlier and waking up earlier too!

I know it’s only been 3 days and I can’t yet know if this is a result of not watching TikToks before bed, but I have a feeling it might be.

Waking up early has allowed me to focus on other tasks such as writing blog posts before work as well as working towards IT Certifications such as the AWS Cloud Practitioner which I’m currently working towards. 

Instead of scrolling through thousands of videos, I now read books on my phone which not only are beneficial to me but are actually helping me improve key skills. I’m currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear which looks at improving your life by making small changes. 

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What I Hope To Achieve in a Month’s Time

If this experiment is successful, I hope to become more productive in my everyday life and push out more content, mainly blog posts like this. 

I also hope to start living a real life. The one thing I found about many (not all) TokTok creators was that they were promoting this fake lifestyle which just didn’t agree with me. Unfortunately, this isn’t an issue related to TikTok, it’s actually present on all social networks, but for some reason, the algorithm pushed it out to me more than anything else. 

But the main thing I’m hoping to do is to start time-blocking tasks. For example, the other thing that I was constantly doing throughout the day was checking and replying to emails, which was wasting a lot of time. I now want to allocate a time every day when I will go through my emails. 

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Will I Ever Return To TikTok?

That’s a very good question, I mean for starters I have nothing against TikTok!

For those of you who are unaware, before I made this decision, I had two TikTok accounts. I had a personal account where I mainly followed friends and I had a Tech With Dom account where I posted content every so often.

But I wasn’t really posting much content to the platform and I found that my videos weren’t really following any particular niche. That’s another reason that fed my decision in deactivating both accounts.

Now here’s the thing, I like the idea of creating short videos, they don’t take much time to record or edit which for a part-time creator like me, can really be a good thing.

But one of the reasons that I wasn’t creating much content on the platform was that I haven’t found a suitable niche for short videos that is suitable for Tech With Dom, which is another reason that I decided to deactivate the Tech With Dom account.

But if I find a suitable niche for short-form videos, I will likely return to the platform, but only for that niche. However, that is unlikely to happen any time soon and before I can do that I want to live at least 1-month without the platform so that I can work on building routines that stick and work on improving my daily life.

Final Thoughts

It’s no secret that I’ve become a bit of a TikTok addict over the last two or so years and in all seriousness, it wasn’t a bad thing! I learned many cool things on the platform such as recipes as well as skills and life lessons.

But for me, the main problem was that I was spending too much time on it.

Now my decision is technically a bit of an overkill, especially as TikTok has done a lot of work to help people battle addictions such as introducing daily screen time. But once again, the main reason that I’m doing this is to have a break from the platform in an effort to become more productive and focus on my life. After all, sometimes we all need breaks!

Have you ever been in this position, maybe you disagree with my decision. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.