Dialing down on LinkedIn

Aahh… LinkedIn. I’ve been struggling with the platform for years. One the one hand, I’ve made some great connections on there, and it has helped me tremendously in increasing my visibility, or, as I sometimes put it, as a platform for shameless self-promotion.

On the other hand, it has become a pointless waste of time. The constant scrolling through my feed in the hunt for something mildly interesting. The getting sucked into ‘discussions’ with people who only want to see their point of view confirmed, instead of being open to opinions that are different from theirs. The constant rehashing of the same old content and the same old conversations, over and over again.

I’ve tried spending less time on the platform a couple of times. I even tried a long break last year. Did that work? Well, no. I did spend less time on LinkedIn for a while, but not nearly as long or as little as I planned / wanted. Before I knew it, I was back to spending way too much time, attention and energy on consuming mediocre and boring content and low-quality interactions. Think looking for likes or having the aforementioned pointless ‘discussions’.

Yet, I don’t want to give up or leave the platform altogether. I still have great conversations on LinkedIn, though almost exclusively via DM. It is also a great way to look up people I worked with in the past and see what they are doing now, or to find someone that I need to or want to get in touch with. And, I’m not going to lie, it is still a good platform to share my own content and the things I am working on.

But I am thoroughly done with spending too much time and energy on LinkedIn. I want to spend my time in much better ways, instead:

• Start writing blogs for this website again. I’ve not really written as much as I wanted to in the last year or two, and I want to get back to writing on a more regular basis.
• Work on the content for my online contract testing course and get that out the door in the next couple of months.
• Spend more time on building my business. I think this needs no further explanation.
• Get back in shape. I’m working on getting back into long distance running and cycling, and that takes significant time and effort. I know I’d much rather spend my time on a run, a bike ride or working on mobility and core strength than on scrolling on social media.

So, I’ve come up with a set of ‘rules’ for myself on how to deal with LinkedIn. These might be applicable to other online time sinks, too, but as LinkedIn is the main culprit for me at the moment, I’ll start there:

• I will log in once a week, on Friday morning, to accept invites and answer DMs, redirecting follow-up conversations to email
• Throughout the week, I will (infrequently) post links to content that I think needs or deserves amplification, mostly my own content, but I might include links to other people’s work, too, if I really liked it
• I will completely ignore notifications and mentions to avoid getting sucked into the LinkedIn black hole
• The above applies to my LinkedIn feed, too: ignore

Sure, this will have a negative impact on my visibility on the platform. But I’m OK with that, as I am fairly certain that I can easily offset that by spending the time and energy I regain on creating things that have an actual, long-lasting impact. Blog posts. Courses. Talks. Anything other than posts that will be all but invisible in two days.

There are plenty of ways to get my fix of what is happening in the software testing and software development world. There’s the excellent Software Testing Weekly blog aggregration newsletter. I intend to spend more time listening to software testing and software development podcasts. I’ll keep attending and speaking at meetups and conferences, both online and in person. I don’t think I’ll miss much that way.

So, if you want to get or stay in touch with me, please do so via email from now on. Sure, I’ll get to your LinkedIn DM or invite, eventually, but it might take me a few days. Or more.

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