Deleted my 6-year-old Pinterest board, and my screen time went UP for a week

So I finally did the big purge last month. I had 800+ pins saved across 14 boards, stuff I hadn't looked at in ages, mostly recipes and DIY cleaning hacks I never tried. I spent an entire Saturday deleting everything, felt super productive. But here's the weird part, after I cleared it out, I kept opening the app anyway. I'd stare at my empty saved folder like a zombie. My weekly screen time report showed I actually spent 3 more hours in the app that week compared to before. I think the emptiness made me hunt for new content to fill the void, which is totally backwards from what I wanted. My theory is that deleting stuff without replacing it with a new habit just leaves a hole, and you fill it with the same bad behavior. But my friend says I should have kept one small board as a landing spot, so I had somewhere to put new stuff instead of wandering aimlessly through the explore page. Has anyone else seen their usage spike right after a big digital cleanup, or did I just do it wrong somehow?

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1 Comment

paule533d ago

Hold your horses on the theory part. Deleting stuff doesn't leave a hole that makes you hunt, it just removes the reason you had to open the app in the first place. You were probably already in the habit of checking Pinterest out of boredom, and the empty board gave you a clean excuse to keep doomscrolling the explore page. Your friend's idea is solid though, keeping one board as a "maybe" pile gives your brain a landing spot so you don't wander into the algorithm's trap. Try making that board about stuff you genuinely plan to use this week, not future-you fantasy projects. If you still catch yourself opening the app with no purpose, that's just muscle memory, not the void calling you.