Every once in awhile, social media is tempting.

It sounds great in theory. A place where I can meet new people, exchange ideas, find clients for my service, and learn new things? Sign me up!

And then I do sign up, and I don't like the way I feel. I don't like "consuming content." I don't like how the app is designed to keep me using it.

It doesn't feel like human connection. It feels like a dystopian wasteland.

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I deeply miss teaching school.

For years, I showed up every morning to The Little Middle School, just like a real job with a boss. In effect, I had hired myself to work directly with the students, instructing them in math and science and writing and history and laughing at their hijinks. It was challenging, rewarding, frustrating, interesting, and fun.

I didn’t quit because I didn’t love it. I quit because I had other things I wanted to do. Now, I’m a thousand miles away while school goes on without me. I have had to let go, and that’s been challenging and rewarding, too.

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A few weeks ago, I decided that I would design my own knitted leg warmers.

I sketched out a schematic and chart, knitted some small swatches of the basic pattern, and then started in on the first leg warmer.

Things went okay and they came out pretty good. However, the back side, where I had done the shaping, looked a a little unrefined.

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In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

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I’ve talked to many families over the years who have told me how much they love my school program — but won’t be enrolling their child.

It goes something like, “We love your school and we’ve gone around and around on how to make it work, but she doesn’t want to leave her friends.”

It is entirely possible that these people are just saying that to be nice, but I think there’s more to it.

It seems related to a logical fallacy that Cal Newport points out in his book Digital Minimalism. Newport suggests that people tend to be hesitant to give up an activity or situation that has any benefit, despite the unwanted downsides.

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