Instagram for creatives: a how not to guide

In 2018 I took a small step that changed my life: I joined Instagram. With its happy union of pithy copy and pretty images, Instagram appealed to an inner magpie. The plan was to chart my sewing progress as I began to wind my way back to working life after my second child.

It was supposed to be just for fun but, nagging away in the back of my mind, was an instinct it might lead somewhere. And it did: through twists and turns, it led to my current working life – a mixture of writing, designing and sewing.

For the first few years I posted pictures of myself to the site in every new thing I’d made. After all, it makes sense – how can you show how well something is made if you don’t also show the thing it is made for? After the initial discomfort of ‘being seen’, it didn’t seem so strange; I was part of a community that rejoiced in a love of sewing and marvelled at one another’s talents.

As time went on, and the balance of my interactions shifted towards work rather than play, I became aware of how much time I was spending on the app and increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which my face was on the internet. Around the time of the pandemic (probably not a coincidence), I began to delicately unpeel the tendrils of social media. It was a slow programme of extrication but, eventually, I found I could check out.

In fact, I found it increasingly hard to check in. When I did, I noticed other people were saying the same thing: ‘I’ve not been on here much recently’ seemed to be the first line in every other post on my feed. You never realise you’re part of the zeitgeist, until the zeitgeist smacks you in the face.

There will be countless reasons why this is happening: the politicisation of the social sphere, the sense we are simply cash cows for big tech, aggressive advertising, covert advertising, the reign of reels, an algorithm which decides what we might like rather than what we do…

Whatever the reason, if you want to use Insta less here’s my advice: get off it, as often as you can. Don’t allow it to hijack your valuable attention. How do you do this? Here are a few tips:

1. Remove the app from your landing page or, better, from your phone entirely
   
2. Set a timer for each app so you’re notified when you’ve overspent your day’s quota
   
3. Stop scrolling: make no scrolling a rule. It sounds too obvious but it works
   
4. Turn off notifications. (As above, obvious but true)
   
5. Publish and run: if you need to post don’t hang around or return to check responses
   
6. Set a time each day or week to check in on comments and messages

The beady eyed will notice that this policy is not very social. If it feels a bit ruthless regarding the many lovely people we e-meet on Instagram, that’s because it is. But our sociability should not be a commodity. At the end of the day, my staying on the app is causing others to do the same and, in the end, we all lose out to Silicon Valley.

This isn’t a guide to giving up Instagram – that’s easy – just delete the damned thing and go and enjoy your freedom. It’s a call to disengage without beating yourself up about the repercussions.

Since I stopped giving the app so much attention, my reach has diminished. For too long the very prospect deterred me from disengaging. The fear is that if you don’t feed the beast (by which I mean the algorithm) with your own endless attention, the beast will knock you into the ravine with its tail.

Now I’ve finally taken the hit, I realise it was worth it: I’ve been able to see far more clearly the direction I want to go in. I have more time for the creative endeavour that drove me to Instagram in the first place. Where once, on opening the app to make a post, I would have scrolled to see what everyone was up to, now I look only at the top post. The raccoon videos can wait.

This post could have been a long list of all that’s wrong with social media. Believe me, I was tempted to write it. But that wouldn’t help us balance the reality of the online world with our creative practice. Many of us still need to use these apps for work and some still enjoy using them for fun – we just don’t want to do it quite so much, and certainly not when we feel our attention is being manipulated out of us and away from the things we love.

Have you been on an Instagram hiatus of late? I’d love to learn more about why you disengaged…