A Blogger's View of Facebook....It's Simply A Waste of Time!

I’ve also recently stopped checking Facebook.  I’ve had a Facebook account since 2009, and I was in the habit of checking it several times a day.  I don’t play any games or use any of the apps, and we don’t have a smart phone, so I wasn’t on Facebook unless I was at my computer.  But it was still taking up too much of my time.  I probably spent somewhere between two and five minutes each time I checked Facebook, but when you do that several times a day, it adds up.  

So ten days ago, I decided to start checking Facebook once a week.  I thought it would be a lot harder than it was.  The first day, I had to stop myself several times, but after that I sort of forgot about it.  It was much easier than I thought it would be to break the habit.  When I logged in for my weekly visit on Saturday, I realized that I hadn’t really missed anything.  

I also spent a few minutes unsubscribing from updates from a whole bunch of people.  I have about 120 “friends” on Facebook, but the reality is that only about 20 of them are people I’m actually close to.  Another 20 or so are people who were in the Peace Corps at the same time I was – we have very similar values and I enjoy a lot of the links they post, so I’m still subscribed to their updates.  But all the people I went to high school with and haven’t seen since 1993?  Not so much.  

Distant relatives with whom I have almost nothing in common?  Do I really need to spend even five seconds reading about what they did today?  I don’t think so.  My feed now only has updates from close friends, close family members, and informational sites that I enjoy (like Amanda Russell, for example, and a local organic farm).  That should make it easier and faster to skim through everything once a week.  And I’ve “found” at least a half an hour per day that I can use to do other stuff.  Yesterday I realized that I was finished with everything on my to-do list and still had an hour before I had to make dinner.  So I sat on the floor and played with my boys, which was far more productive than Facebook could ever be.  

I’ve seen other bloggers write about deleting their Facebook accounts or weaning themselves off of it, and I always found it inspiring.  So I’m sharing my story too.  The biggest take-away for me was how it was so much easier than I thought it would be.  After about two days, I honestly didn’t miss it at all.

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