facebook-free

I get up in the morning and usually, instead of getting ready for the day, exercising, or spending time with my spouse, I jump on the computer to check my email...and to look at anything "important" on facebook. 45 minutes later, I realize I've wasted time that could be spent doing any number of other things, but I shrug it off with a twinge of regret. After all, I'm keeping up with friends! I'm reading good articles! Throughout the day when I need a "break," the same thing would occur with the same excuses.

Then, late-September, I grew tired of it all. Sure, I was keeping up with friends and seeing interesting pictures and learning who was now engaged/pregnant/had a baby/other major life changes, but I also was bogged down with a lot of vapid posts and enraging articles (or pointless ones). Was this really worth the amount of time I was spending on it each day? I had already taken the app off my phone (which was an excellent choice), and I was curious to see what ditching FB entirely would be like.

So I stepped away. I promised myself that October would be a month where I didn't check Facebook. I checked it once in the middle of the month and once because a friend had listed something she wanted me to look at, but otherwise I stayed off of the site.

The first week was hard. My impulse was to check FB at every opportunity where there was a lull, where I was bored, or where I just would normally go look at it. Then, by the end of the second week, I stopped thinking about it, my impulse to check it went away, and I actually forgot about it (except for informing people that I wasn't really on FB lately, so to contact me directly.

It turns out to have been...freeing. I have been more focused on everything else, and I have not been sucked into drama. I have missed things friends have posted (and birthday reminders), but hopefully people won't mind too much. I think after October, I'm going to continue to mostly stay away, maybe only logging in once a week at most.

All this, of course, is not a judgment on anyone else's use of FB. Given my proclivity to be constantly on it and not doing other things, refraining from using it regularly has been a good decision, and one that I'm glad I tried. So if you want to go have coffee with me or chat, give me a call or send me a message!