A while ago I found myself getting sucked into the vortex of the news feed on facebook way too often, wasting countless hours on it. You know how you just go to check one thing, and 3 hours later you’re watching Gordon Ramsay say “you’re an idiot sandwich,” that kind of vortex.
I’m a firm believer that to change something you have to know what you’re actually doing first; kind of like a before and after assessment. So I downloaded a Chrome extension called ‘Webtime tracker‘, which simply measured the amount of time I spent on different websites. Feeling accomplished at having downloaded this I forgot about my resolve to escape the clutches of social media for a few weeks. I later looked back on the stats and I was spending something like 12 hours a week on Facebook alone.
This was when I was just beginning to make the most of my time being ‘productive.’ 12 hours seems like a very long time but if you were to track your usage I’m sure it would surprise you as well. This was step number one, tracking my usage. This shocked me but I knew I didn’t have the strength to just stop the reflex of typing f when I opened Chrome and facebook.com autofilling. I then found another extension on Chrome called ‘Block site‘ which enables you to block any website on Chrome, so that what I did. I blocked Facebook, but I only blocked it between 8am and 6pm so when I was meant to be studying it was harder to access facebook. Sounds great right?
There was one major flaw in this extension, it had the option to put in a password to unblock the website. I didn’t want this to become another thing I did reflexively so I made the password “stopdontuseme” thinking the length and message would stop me. This worked for the first week but I ended up getting so quick at putting that password in the Block site didn’t end up working. I had to make it even harder for myself.
The next step was to, rather than just have a page with a password come up, I chose to redirect the page to something else, something productive (like my ‘write’ page on my blog). This was the final step which worked, in order to access Facebook I had to go into the extension, put the password in, then go in and unblock Facebook. This was enough barriers to stop me accessing it. Now, in the past 90 days I’ve been on Facebook for a total of 2 hours!
Now, you must be thinking, “what about your phone?” Well, I overcame that hurdle as well. I simply deleted the app. “But what about messenger? How am I going to talk to people?” Luckily, on Mac you can download the messenger app and have it on your desktop so you don’t need to go through Facebook.
Now, the most common reason I used to tell myself I need to access Facebook; “my work uses it to communicate.” This one is simple, just check it every now and again on a browser on your phone, this may sound like it defeats the purpose but I’ve found I’ve cracked the addiction of it, meaning I am able to just check the news from work and be done.
Now, I’m not saying this is easy, it’s probably taken me 2 years to do this but I’ve essentially created more hours in my day to spend on what I really want to be doing.
In summary, to help with reducing your social media usage (or any behaviour change for that matter) you want to:
- Identify and quantify the problem (track your usage)
- Increase barriers to usage (block the website and delete the app)
- Further increase barriers if needed (redirect the blocked website)
- Break the habit and choose when you WANT to use it, not doing so reflexively.
I hope that my experience helps you reclaim your time, stopping you getting sucked into the vortex of Facebook, Youtube or Instagram (when you don’t want to go down it).
Harrison Hansford 