Scrolling burnt my toast and killed my stories. An idle mind should be the fertile ground for your imagination, so why let social media rob you of what you need most?

Procrastination is a writer’s greatest foe. It takes many forms, and all can be as detrimental to the writing process as others. There’s the “let me just rearrange my desk one more time” type of procrastination, the “I never realised my jumper had so many bobbles that I could manually remove” type and then the “just another cup of tea” form. The worst, however, for me, is the doom scroll.

Justified at first as “I’m searching for stories and inspiration”, it could be a useful tool. Somewhere you can experience different voices (if the algorithm allows), see wild and unheard-of places (if they’re not actually created by AI) and find people who could morph, inform or be developed into characters. But that justification soon loses credibility as I watch another squirrel run the gauntlet of a man-made assault course to the soundtrack of Mission Impossible.

The dip into social and falling into the trap of doom scrolling isn’t unique. It’s about as common as grass, but it’s a trap for writers nonetheless.

It’s an additional distraction that can become all-consuming. The concept of time is lost the moment your thumb pulls and begins the scroll. I’ve lost senseless hours to it. If it wasn’t for my smoke alarm and the smell of burning toast, I could still be in that session of endlessly watching people walking into glass doors.

After one lost morning to the unusual exploration of life through the eyes (or GoPro) of cocker spaniels, I decided to leave my phone in the kitchen. The physical break enabled me to focus first on the bobbles on my jumper and then on my story. If I write that the difference in terms of my attention to my story was huge, you’ll hardly be surprised. However, what I did notice was a greater clarity and vision.

While I picked at the bobbles on my jumper, I could still mentally muse on what my character was feeling, doing and thinking. While I scrolled on my phone, I was lost in the multitude of stories I dipped into, and none of them left a mark on my mind.

This isn’t a cautionary tale that is new. In fact, it feels like it’s such old ground that it’s been paved twice and had Professor Alice Roberts (TV’s popular archaeologist) excavating beneath it. For all that, it doesn’t mean that writers shouldn’t be wary.

Writing time is precious when you’re not a professional writer. Writing is done in stolen moments, sacrificed time, found time and made time. An hour here or an hour there. To lose any of that to a scroll feels like a loss of purpose.Scrolling may not have killed my stories, but it has robbed me of moments I could have used to go places I’d never been before, met people I could have loved (or loved to dislike) or experienced a moment of magic in my story. While scrolling, I suspend my own imagination and passively observe someone else’s. Without the phone in my hand, I can scroll through my own imagination. And that’s so much more productive.