Fixing My Social Media Addiction
Hey, It’s been 3–4 months since I don’t use Facebook. Also last month I restricted my use of Youtube. Though I still suffer from the YouTube issue. Working on it but I was able to quit Facebook smoothly. So I just wanna share some things I used to get out of this black hole. Which is sucking everyone in.
Realizing My Overuse
One of my favorite quotes is,
What gets measured gets managed ~ Peter Drucker
And it’s 100% true if you don’t track something you won’t be able to manage it. So when I saw I was spending a lot of time on Facebook. So I decided to track my web activity time. For that, I got this extension called “Web Activity Time Tracker”. There are better ones but this one seems pretty simple.
So after the whole day using it I found that on average I waste 2+ hours on Facebook. Which was a lot of time to do nothing.
The Primary Fix
The beginning was to understand the algorithms. I found out the biggest reason people spend so much on Facebook is “The News Feed”. News Feed was designed to be addictive. So I decided to get rid of the News Feed but Facebook didn’t have any built-in option to do that. It was expected cause that’s where they earn from. So I got a third-party chrome extension called “News Feed Eradicator For Facebook” (You can actually block the home page of any of the top social media websites).
This really helped me decrease my Facebook time. This is how my News Feed after using the extension. The quote actually changes.
New Problem
Right, when I thought everything was going great then the evil “Watch” came into play. As you know I blocked Newsfeed to stop scrolling but I still had to visit Facebook for my messages. And as the problem with this extension is it just blocks the News Feed. So you can still click on watch and just start scrolling like before. So again I would come for messages and start wasting 1.5–2 hours per day on the Watch page of Facebook.
The End Game
This time I knew I have to get rid of Facebook but still keep Messenger but since I am a PC user It was not possible for me until Facebook launched Messenger for windows. I got that for my messages and blocked facebook.com using a chrome extension called “BlockSite”
You can block any domain you want using this. If you try to access a blocked website this will show up
Now you can edit the block list. But that’s too much work. And in my case, I knew Facebook was a time waste. So I never went through the process to unblock. The work didn’t seem worth it to just waste time.
For a few days, I had the craving to check and I was getting stupid emails from Facebook. Like, ‘X’ commented on Y’s post. So what can I do? They would just send anything to get me back to Facebook.
And If you’re using Facebook on your just uninstall it. It’s much simpler for you guys.
So this is for today, I’ll catch you guys up on the next one. Till then stay safe, peace.
