Why Ignoring LinkedIn for 90 Days Might Help Your Career

Introduction: Ignoring LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become a hub for professionals, job seekers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. People turn to this platform to find job opportunities, network with decision-makers, advertise their successes and expertise, and stay updated about what is happening in their fields.

Yet constant use of the service might make it a tool that consumes more than it gives. That is why asking Why Ignoring LinkedIn for 90 Days Might Help Your Career is a relevant question. Taking a break from LinkedIn will not hurt your professional life.

In fact, it can allow you to gain crucial experience, invest time in self-promotion, and become clearer about what you want from your career.

Why Ignoring LinkedIn for 90 Days Might Help Your Career?

1. You Can Focus on Gaining Crucial Experience

The point of taking a break from using LinkedIn is having the time and space that you can devote to your growth as a professional. You can invest the extra time in studying content writing, marketing, public speaking, leadership, or another area relevant to your work. You can also pursue higher education or obtain a professional certification.

If being constantly online makes it too difficult to put effort into useful activities that can give you a career boost, a 90-day break will be a great opportunity to increase your skill level and update your resume.

2. You Will Avoid Comparing Your Life With Others

When browsing LinkedIn, you inevitably come across individuals who have more work experience, skills, and professional training than you. You might see people who made a career move last week or reached an important personal milestone recently. The reason why these people seem so good at what they do is that they only show their best sides while highlighting achievements and skills.

Seeing that others are further along in their careers than you may be demoralizing, especially if you spend too much time on the platform. The 90-day break will help you avoid demotivation and prevent you from constantly measuring your life, work, and progress against others. This break will give you a push toward finding and clearly stating your professional goals.

3. You Can Invest Time Into Building Your Portfolio

For many people, especially those just starting their careers or pursuing opportunities as a freelancer, portfolio building is one of the most important and time-consuming activities in self-promotion. As a beginner, you may not have much to offer in terms of actual works completed. However, during a 90-day break, you can build quality samples to demonstrate your talent, skills, and areas of specialization.

For example, if you want to be a content writer, you can build a portfolio that will include blog articles, captions, email templates, and other types of text-based content. If you were a designer, you could create samples of your work or show how your skills can be applied in different contexts. The point of this step is to build a clear demonstration of your talents and expertise.

4. You Can Become More Productive

Social media platforms such as LinkedIn exist in the form of continuous engagement. Whenever you browse the content on the app, you can click on it, like, comment, and share, spending a lot of time on the service while trying to keep up with everything that happens.

When you invest a little more time into actual work and less into browsing and reacting to others’ posts, you will see that you get more done. In short, you become more productive.

The increase in productivity levels can be due to more focused attention on your work or other tasks as well as the removal of the distraction of being able to access social media at any given moment.

5. You Can Set Boundaries and Gain Clarity

One of the ways in which many people benefit from a break from using LinkedIn is that they set personal boundaries with the application. Constant access to it and continuous decision-making about whether to like, comment, share, view, or ignore posts can affect your time investment, productivity, and focus.

However, if you limit yourself for 90 days, you will be able to decide how your involvement in the app can be useful rather than destructive to your day-to-day work and life.

6. You Can Decide What You Want From Your Career

It is easy to spend a significant amount of time on LinkedIn being inspired by others and, subsequently, comparing yourself with them. You can get motivated by posts from managers within your field or by reading articles about being a better leader, becoming an entrepreneur, working from home, studying artificial intelligence, or starting to make more money, to give a few examples. The issue that arises from spending too much time on the service is that it becomes difficult to decide which of the offered paths to choose.

Using the app only in 2021, however, you have the ability to learn, reflect, and decide for yourself what kind of work environment you prefer: to work for someone, as a freelancer, or start your own business, among other options.

You can identify the traits of a good leader, lighthouse skills, qualities of a decent company to work for, and many other factors that you would not pay enough attention to while being a part of the constant scroll of information that occurs on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Ultimately, Why Ignoring LinkedIn for 90 Days Might Help Your Career becomes evident when a person realizes that there is more they can dedicate their time and effort into in order to become better at what they do.

7. You Can Invest Efforts Into Creating Instead of Consuming

Spending a long time on LinkedIn can mean investing a significant amount of effort into consuming the content produced by others. While it is not a negative thing, for the majority of people it will only get them so far in their professional development.

However, when you invest your efforts into creating content rather than consuming it, you begin to actively participate in the process of building your professional presence and identity.

Creating content means engaging in deliberate practice, completing extra projects, or producing original work that you can use to update your portfolio or resume. Instead of viewing the content produced by others, you can take action by making your contributions.

8. You Can Come Back With Something Worth Sharing

It is entirely okay and normal to browse LinkedIn for the sole purpose of viewing job openings for careers that you are passionate about. Yet consuming more content than you create will leave you with little to actually post about besides something you did while being a part of social media. When given a 90-day break, your time can be invested into learning, creating, and getting work done.

By the end of this period, you can have content samples, new project updates, or the latest developments in your areas of work to post about with real, worthwhile comments that you can share with others.

9. A Break Can Help You Better Manage Your Social Media

The importance and relevance of a 90-day break from LinkedIn lies in the ability to use the app more wisely than before. While taking a break gives you a chance to invest the extra time into learning, practicing, creating content, updating your portfolio or resume, and gaining productivity, the return to social media is equally as important.

Upon returning to the app, you can decide how often to use it, what to focus on more: job searching or networking, what to follow, and which posts to engage with in order to promote your content and yourself in the best possible way.

Conclusion: Ignoring LinkedIn

While it is perfectly ok to use apps like LinkedIn on a daily basis, a break of 90 days will give you plenty of opportunities to update and improve the skills that make a difference in your work. It will create new chances for productivity and self-promotion.

This is the reason why ignoring LinkedIn for a while might be beneficial to some people’s careers. It is not necessary, however, a permanent break to stop using the app. Instead, in 90 days people realize the role that LinkedIn plays in their lives so they can choose whether to continue being a part of it or limit their involvement.

Your career growth should not depend on how often you scroll through LinkedIn. Use your time to build valuable skills, strengthen your portfolio, and discover better opportunities. When you are ready to take the next step, explore the Best Job Tools to find opportunities that match your skills and career goals.