Neil Desai

The average facebook user spends >55 minutes per day on the site. That’s an hour of time wasted. That’s 365 hours per year. I used to be one of those people. I was always on Facbook procrastinating and wasting my time. Now I’m rarely on it except for maybe once a day and only for about 10 minutes. Very rarely has Facebook ever been useful to me but in the few times that it has I enjoy being on it. I like to keep in touch with old friends and people I don’t get to see all the time. However, I don’t like how there are people who are constantly on it and wasting their time away. If you are like I was and want to decrease your Facebook usage than here are some steps you can take.

• Identify your use. Think about how much you use Facebook a day. Is it about an hour a day? If you don’t think you use often then time yourself today and see how much time you really spend on it.
• Quit cold turkey for a week. This is the first thing I did when I wanted to stop my addiction. I deactivated my account for a week. Go to account settings and click deactivate your account. A nice option with Facebook is you can deactivate your account and the next time you log in all of your data, friends, etc are all still there just like you left it. It makes it really easy to just quit for a week knowing you won’t have to re-add all of your friends again. The first time I got back on after a week my habits went back to normal. I then just deactivated again for about a month or so and my usage has significantly dropped since I got back on.
• Figure out what you want to use it for. Use your week off and decide what you really want to use Facebook for. Make it a tool you use to maintain relationships with friends instead of sucking your time away.
• Logout each time you Facebook. Every time you’re on Facebook, logout after you’re done. If every time you go to Facebook.com you have to log back in then it because a little bit less tempting to go back.
• Delete your Bookmark. This tip goes hand in hand with the last one. If you have a Facebook bookmark then just delete it making it less tempting to go back constantly.

Try it out and leave a comment on how it’s going for you.