social networking sites continue to explode in popularity. according to nielsen:
- in december ’09 alone, over 300 million people logged onto facebook.
- on average, people spent 5.5 hours on facebook during december 2009 (a 201% increase from december 2008).
- over 300,000 businesses are now on facebook promoting their goods/services.
depending on your line of work, facebook may be unavoidable. but even if it is unavoidable, there’s good news: it doesn’t have to run your life. i have compiled a list of helpful hints to keep facebook from ruining your life.
how to minimize your time on facebook:
- choose your friends wisely. if you really want to limit your time on facebook, just limit the number of friends that you accept. remember, the less friends you accept, the less number of possible interactions that arise. convince yourself that you do not need to accept every friend request that shows up on your page. just because you went to the same high school with somebody doesn’t mean you need to become their “online friend” today. besides, apparently, the human mind can only handle 150 friends anyway.
- skip the applications/games. if you are on facebook to connect with friends, then get on facebook to connect with friends. you don’t need to spend your time joining the mafia, building a farm, or finding out which disney princess you are. however, if you would like facebook to be your online gaming platform… that is certainly up to you.
- remove all e-mail notifications. by turning off all notifications to your e-mail or mobile device, you remove facebook’s opportunity to interrupt your daily life at any moment. you also remove the urge to respond to every notification as it appears. to change these options, go to account settings and choose the “notifications” tab, there click “off” on all the e-mail notifications you don’t really need.
- hide unnecessary notifications from your newsfeed. if you’re not interested in someone’s or an application’s updates specifically, you can hide them from your newsfeed permanently. just hover over the update’s upper right corner and when you see the button “hide” appear, click to choose “hide this person’s updates” or “hide (whatever app) updates”. i use this on every application that appears in my newsfeed, on people who update way-too-often, and on people who constantly post negative status reports (i don’t need them bringing me down with them.)
- don’t facebook chat. among the most inefficient methods of communication in our world today stand internet chatting, texting, and morse code. and you don’t even have to initiate a facebook chat to get stuck in the middle of one… should a friend notice you are online. to go offline even when using facebook, click “chat,” “options,” and “go offline.”
- sync your social networking sites. if you are also a user of youtube, flickr, twitter, or etc., there are many applications/software that will sync them for you so that you do not need to upload/update things twice.
- only log-in once/day. certainly, this works only as well as your personal discipline allows. if once/day is still chewing up too much of your life, choose any frequency you desire.
- get drastic and limit your minutes. if personal discipline isn’t working for you, there are websites that will limit your time for you: minutesplease.com, for example.
- honorable mention: choose your photos wisely, choose your fan pages wisely, and become a friend of the “ignore” button.
these tips can be used for any user of facebook whether you are on for personal or commercial reasons.
oh, and don’t forget to become a fan of becoming minimalist on facebook.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m on Facebook but I have to admit that I log in only once or twice a week. I do find most people’s updates to be pretty mundane and I really get annoyed with the invites to do Mob Wars, or Farmer whatever, or Pillow Fight. I’ve yet to accept any of those requests.
I do thank you for the tip on limiting notifications. I did not know how to do that and it will certainly come in handy.
- Charley
i just joined face book, and one of the things i like about it are all the options to ignore things and such. i also like that it has a much cleaner look that myspace. there isn’t a ton of glittery crap and annoying music and videos all over people’s profile pages. i think i will be deleting my myspace account as soon as i get the hang of everything on facebook. the ignore button has already come in handy several time.
Have you tried lite.facebook.com? It saves me HOURS of mindless screen-staring.
Hiya your RSS feed does not work and I can’t subscribe to your site!
@ rebekah – lite.facebook.com – i love it! thanks for the tip.
@ iris – thankya for mentioning that about our feed. we’ll take a look at it.
*update* – give it a shot now and see if you have better luck.
Useful update. I disagree about Morse code, though: while not useful for most everyday use, it is still efficient in the circumstances for which it was designed (very limited bandwidth, noisy transmission lines, and so forth).
thank you for these tips, and thanks to rebekah for the facebook lite information! i have gone back to using facebook, and am sure with these ideas in mind i will have a better experience this time around.
This article comes at the perfect time! I am in the process of cutting back on my FB usage. I deleted about 100 people off of my page as well. I don’t need to keep in touch with all of them, nor do I really want to! Thank you for this article!
I have minimized facebook from my life….completely facebook-free and loving it!
I had a Facebook account for a year and then a few weeks ago, I deleted my account. Too many invites for childish things. I tried to use it for my consulting work but it just didn’t work out. I’m still a Twitter and identica fan, though. identica is especially nice. Built on Open Source technology and much better with privacy.
Great article!
Another issue with Facebook is their privacy policy. Look at it really close before signing up with them. A few weeks ago, there was a great story about the new Facebook privacy policy on NPR. They’re definitely catering to advertisers. The story talked about how difficult the new policy is to understand for most people so they just pick the default settings. That’s a big mistake.
Just thought I would mention this.
There appears to be a tip missing from this list…
Don’t join!
Seriously. I’m not trying to be cheeky.
I realise that many people will be incredulous at such a suggestion, but it’s true.
@gareth – i guess that would minimalize your time on facebook once and for all. i realize that not every one wants to / needs to join facebook.
i have found incredible benefits both personally and professionally speaking. in my life, it has become a valuable resource for staying in touch with people i no longer live near. and still for others, depending on their line of work, facebook may have become unavoidable. for them, we offered the list above. but your suggestion has been duly noted.
Thanks for including the how-to about hiding applications in the feed! I didn’t realize FB had evolved that much. Last time I tried it, it would have eliminated all postings by what were otherwise good friends.
Unfortunately, facebook lite has been discontinued. Another minimalist option is to run the mobile version (m.facebook.com) in your computer browser. Too extreme for some people, just right for others.