How to Minimize Time on Facebook

I don't know about you, but I have a love / hate relationship with Facebook. I need it for promotion purposes and to keep up with what others are up to, both personally and business-wise. I wish I didn't need it though, because once I sign into Facebook I find that time just gets eaten up reading posts by my friends and family.

I am also in at least a dozen groups that are business-related. Most of them are to do with reselling and other forms of making money online. For quite some time I was getting notifications every time someone posted in any of the groups. It filled my email Inbox constantly until I couldn't take it any longer.

I'm not saying that reading the posts was a waste of time because I did learn a lot of great stuff that helped me in my eBay business. Eventually though, it got to the point where I wasn't learning anything new, and the notifications of new posts became a nuisance. Something had to be done so that I could stop having to deal with large numbers of emails.

I found that spending time on Facebook was cutting into my productivity in a big way. I estimate I spent at least an hour each time reading posts 2 or 3 times a day. If you add up those hours over a week I lost at least a day's productivity. When I finally faced the fact that I was causing more harm to myself than good I realized that I had to do something about it immediately.

First thing I did was to go through the groups I had joined and analyze whether there was any advantage to staying a member. As a result a few groups went bye-bye. The groups that I decided to stay in all had notifications turned off. Every single one. I felt strongly that I needed to take a complete break from the groups for at least a week to see what impact it would have on my getting things done.

No longer spending those hours on Facebook did indeed improve my productivity. Initially I missed the email notifications, but within a couple of days I started to really enjoy it, experiencing a sense of freedom. I was getting things done! Facebook was reduced to a few minutes here and there, not hours at a time. It was a good move.

The other thing I did to ensure I didn't spend endless hours on Facebook was to install a little Chrome extension called Strict Workflow. This cool little tool, when activated, blocks all social media sites for 25 minutes out of every 30. It is brilliant in its simplicity. You can change the length of time you are blocked too, so I decided to change it to 50 minutes blocked out of every hour. Of course you can go and turn it off completely, but if you are finding it difficult to stay off Facebook you would be foolish to do so.

Facebook is a tool, and should be used as such if you are in business. Don't let it take over your precious time, but at the same time grab every bit of great information you can from it. And if you find yourself spending too much time on it try Strict Workflow!

#Facebook #StrictWorkflow #productivity