Less is Not Always More: Investigating the Impact of Goal Difficulty and Immediacy of Social Media

Social media overuse is becoming prevalent across the globe, hurting users’ mental health and productivity. To reduce social media usage and improve productivity, many users turn to social media blockers that rely on users to specify a social media reduction goal. However, as there is no empirical evidence and guidance on how users should choose the goal optimally, the user-chosen goals may not produce the intended benefits. In this study, we introduce two new dimensions of social media reduction goals — goal difficulty and goal immediacy. We found that the relationship between goal difficulty and productivity is of an inverted-U shape. In addition, the effect of goal difficulty further depends on the prior social media consumption level. We also found that changing goal immediacy from radical to incremental significantly improves the performance of relatively difficult goals, especially for users with higher prior social media consumption levels. Practical implications are discussed.