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If you do not use Facebook these days, then you might be perceived as a stranger among others, as more than 1.7 billion people around the world use Facebook. You might have at least a few hundred contacts added as friends and a lot of them might be posting new statuses daily. This means that you are regularly wasting a lot of time simply by checking their latest updates. I do not mean that these are things that are not that important, but I want to emphasize that a major part of them might be useless or checked later, and not during your working hours. Quitting Facebook might be perceived as something not that kind in a society where it is a norm to be part of it, but there are a few ways that you can use to minimize the time you spend on it.
Employees or students around the world are distracted constantly by the latest notifications from their social media accounts. A lot of students from really good universities in the US use social media even during their lectures.
If you are already content with the way you use Facebook and are not worried that a lot of your time is wasted unproductively, then you might not need to continue reading this article. However, if you are like me, chances are that a considerable portion of your day is spent on meaningless things that do not have any impact in your life. I have started using a few ways that have minimized the time I spend in Facebook and I wanted to share them with you.
1. News Feed Eradicator
This is a Chrome and Firefox plugin that is intended to hide all your news feed and display some motivational quotes daily. This plugin hides the news feed, but you can still go to Facebook groups, or fan pages and see the latest posts there.
I have already written an article about this plugin, which is one of the most popular articles in this blog. This is a plugin that I have been using for more than a year and a half and I also know other people that have been using it for quite some time and are really happy with it.
If you are working and sometimes need to check Facebook to contact with other people during your working hours, then activating this plugin might save you a lot of time. Rather than mindlessly scrolling up and down your news feed, you might get bored as there is not any latest update that might take you time to simply check it.
If you do not want to totally abandon your news feed, as you might need to be informed with the latest updates from your friends, then you can make a rule of deactivating this plugin during the weekends, or after you have finished all the tasks for the day.
2. Unfollow people that you do not want to hear about
It might be true that you are friends with someone in Facebook simply because of the social or family pressure. You do not like the type of posts that they publish, and you do not want to see what they are doing. If that is the case, then you can simply unfollow them, so that they are no longer wasting your time with their latest updates. Chances are that your news feed is consisted of only a few of people that take a major part of it. Unfollowing them can clear up a lot of space in your news feed.
There are also some fan pages that you have liked them simply because a friend of yours opened it and you felt bad to refuse liking them. If you are not interested in the content that this particular page posts, but still want to keep your like on it, then you can simply unfollow it. This way your news feed will have less things that you do not like and you are still in a good relationship with your friend that opened that page.
This technique of unfollowing people might also be something really good for those people that use Facebook app in their smartphones. Using a browser plugin will not be sufficient to hide the news feed from the Facebook app. Unfollowing the people or pages whose content you are not interested to see is something that you might try.
3. Use Messenger.com to chat only
If you use Facebook mostly for chatting with your friends, then you can only use the interface that is dedicated to make it possible to chat, without having to hide all the latest status updates. If you use Facebook to communicate with your remote work colleagues but do not want to waste your time on Facebook, then you can use this application. Then when you go home, you can open Facebook.com and see the latest updates from others.
This small change alone of not using Facebook.com but Messenger.com and still getting the results you want, by being able to chat with your friends or family members can be a huge time saver and which can improve your productivity.
This actually might be a less radical adjustment in comparison with the other previous tips shared in this article. You are not abandoning news feed, but simply postponing its usage after you are done finishing the important things that need to get done.
4. Turn off Facebook app notifications in your app
Having a few hundred of users as friends in Facebook means that you might get a lot of notifications in your Facebook app. Somebody might have just liked a photo that you have recently posted, or a new post has been published in a group that you are part of. These are some minor things that can be checked later, and totally ignored for the time being.
The Facebook app is designed to grab your attention and make you use it as much as possible, but this can degrade the quality of the work that you do. You might not be able to perform at your peak levels by constantly switching your attention to the latest Facebook notifications in your smartphone. Qualitative work requires a lot of concentration and a lot of effort, which might be something rare but very valuable these days. Thus, turning off the notifications from the Facebook app can be very rewarding and fulfilling.
These are only a few things that I have stumbled upon, which might help you. These small changes can actually be some huge changes, so you might resist to try them. My advice would be at least to consider trying one of them, and if you are content with it, then you can continue using it. If you are not content, you can switch the gear back as they were before.
If you are informed and use other ways of reducing the time you spend on Facebook, or other social media, please do not hesitate to share them with us.
