Read this article and I felt really guilty. It's time to reflect.

Reclaiming Our (Real) Lives From Social Media by Nick Bilton

One day in the early 1920s, a young Ernest Hemingway rushed along the streets of Paris seeking shelter from a downpour. He soon came upon a warm cafe on the Place St.-Michel and ducked inside.

After hanging his rain jacket, Hemingway ordered a café au lait, pulled out a notepad and pencil from his pocket and began writing. Before long he had fallen into a trancelike state, oblivious to his surroundings as he penned a story that would later become the first chapter of his memoir, “A Moveable Feast.”

If Hemingway were alive in 2014, he might not have finished what he started writing that day. Realistically, he probably wouldn’t have even put a pen to paper.

Instead, he might have ducked into the cafe, pulled out his smartphone and proceeded to waste an entire afternoon on social media. Perhaps he would update his Facebook to discuss the rogue weather, snap a picture of his café au lait to post on Instagram and then lose the rest of the afternoon to Twitter.

I know I’ve done that — let’s be honest, we all have.

While my early adventures on social sites were exciting and novel, increasingly, my time spent on these services is starting to feel like a lot of wasted time. Like a virus slowly invading its victim, social media has methodically started to consume every hour of my day. Morning coffees, lunchtime breaks, time before bed, was once cordoned off for books, or even just quiet moments of reflection.

Now, it’s all social media all the time. At the end of the day, what do I have to show for it? Am I more enriched as a human being after a couple of hours spent on Facebook? More fulfilled from Pinterest? A deeper person from Instagram?

Maybe, but probably not.

“If you went through history and took away all the stuff people were doing while they were supposed to be doing something else, you wouldn’t have a lot left,” said John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford and author of the book “The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling.” “But time spent poking around in a library in the past led to great ideas. It’s unclear if the same is true for time spent online.”

I’m not blaming the Internet for procrastination. Wasting time is as old as history itself. (An early reference to procrastination was chronicled in a rabbinical book from the year 200, where students were told not to put off their studies.) Yet I am blaming the Internet for people into a cacophony of links, videos and pictures that are constantly being dangled in their faces like some sort of demented digital carrot on a stick. Links that seem like fun at the time, but afterward leave us all feeling a little bit empty inside.

According to Facebook, the company’s 1.23 billion users log into the site for an average of 17 minutes each day. In total, that’s more than 39,757 years of our time collectively spent on Facebook in a single day. And that’s just one website. Numerous reports estimate that 18- to 34-year-olds spend as much as 3.8 hours a day on social media. These days 35- to 49-year-olds don’t fare much better, racking up 3 hours a day on social sites.

Neil Fiore, a psychologist and author of four books on productivity, said that while procrastination can be a good thing, helping stave off anxiety about an impending project, today we tend to procrastinate in online labyrinths that are difficult to climb out of. This, he noted, is partly because websites are trying to grab our attention and entice us to stay longer.

Most alarmingly, some of these companies have also learned they can push and pull levers to affect our mood.

Last month Facebook came under heavy fire after news surfaced that its data scientists had manipulated the news feed for 689,003 users, removing all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see if they could affect how people feel.

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,” wrote Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook researching emotion expression, in the research paper about the experiment. Mr. Kramer added that Facebook found it could cause “massive-scale contagion via social networks.”

While this was an experiment, and even if Facebook isn’t regularly manipulating the news feed, you don’t need to be a Facebook researcher to realize that its news feed changes how we feel.

For a while people have been trying to push back against online distractions. Some install software like SelfControl or Cold Turkey on their computer that will block access to certain sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This month, a Dutch nonprofit put forth an initiative called “99 Days of Freedom,” which urges people to abstain from Facebook for three months to see if their mood improves as a result.

But for many people, it’s not that easy to just quit for three months. Social media is entwined in daily life, and abandoning Facebook and Twitter would be like trying to quit driving in protest of oil companies, or giving up electricity as a way of objecting to Con Edison’s environmental policies.

For me, I’m making a change — albeit a small one. Last month I decided to try my own Facebook experiment. Rather than wake up in the morning and get lost on social media for an hour or more, I’ve started spending the early hours of my mornings reading a book.

The experiment seems to be working. So far, I feel so much more fulfilled and that my days belong to me again. I’ve given up chasing dangling digital carrots.

I’m reading two to three books a week. This week I started “A Moveable Feast.” And even if I spend the rest of my day on social media, I still feel as if I’ve done something enriching.

You don’t have to quit social media; the trick is finding balance.

NICK BILTON is a columnist and reporter for The New York Times. “Disruptions” appears weekly at nytimes.com/styles.