| How to Quit Facebook Jan 4th 2013, 08:00 Maybe your affinity for Facebook began with a simple desire to keep in touch with your friends, or make new ones online. Maybe you were just bored. But now, you're finding it difficult to spend an hour of your waking life without checking or thinking about Facebook. Here's how to help yourself quit. This article will help you limit your Facebook activity. To really, permanently quit Facebook, see How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account. - Track your usage. Keep tabs of what you actually do on Facebook. After every session, ask yourself, "What did I just accomplish by checking Facebook?" Odds are, you're probably just logging in to see if you've been poked, check for updates, write a new note, add a song, and other mindless tasks you do to waste time — even if you logged in for a set purpose, like accepting a friend request.
- Recording your Facebook activities can help you realize how much time you actually spend getting nothing constructive done.
- Mark the time when you log in and when you log out, or download an app for your browser that will track how much time you spend on various sites.
- Define your Facebook goals. Why did you originally sign up? So you could remember friends' birthdays? Find and keep old friends? Meet people with similar interests? Whatever your goals may be on Facebook, make sure that you devote your time there to accomplishing those goals instead of going off-track with activities that get you nowhere.
- If you have no goals (i.e. if you signed up just because you had nothing better to do), skip the next step.
- Follow a Facebook schedule. For each Facebook goal, write down how much time and at what frequency you'll need to be on the site to achieve that goal. Then, write down the total number of hours per week that you should be spending on Facebook.
- If it seems like too much time, adjust your activity times accordingly.
- Following this schedule might bring your Facebook addiction under control without requiring you to quit altogether.
- Look at this example schedule for inspiration:
- Staying in touch with college — Check every other day; spend no more than 15 minutes responding to messages only from college friends (1 hour per week)
- Maintaining a group — Check every morning and evening for 10 minutes each, only to remove any spam or junk. Note to self: do not respond to posts, comments or messages during this time (2 hours, 20 minutes per week)
- Keeping a group interesting — Spend 30 minutes every other day reading all of the comments and responding (2 hours per week)
- Finding new friends — Browse profiles for 30 minutes, twice a week (1 hour per week)
- Total time I plan to spend on Facebook per week: 6 hours, 20 minutes
- Focus on the other activities you're neglecting. If you find yourself spending, say, 10 hours a week on Facebook, make a list of all the other things you could accomplish in that time. You could:
- Block the time you spend on Facebook. Check out How to How to Block Websites on Firefox or How to Block a Website on Internet Explorer for assistance.
- You can use a free self-control program called Cold Turkey to temporarily disable your access to popular social media websites.
- Parental control programs such as EzInternetTimer or TimeUpKidz can also help.
- Leave Facebook. If you've created a schedule but can't stick to it — or if you've decided that any time spent on Facebook is wasted — you may need to quit cold turkey. This is a last resort and is easier said than done.
- There are two options here: you can either deactivate your account, which lets you take a breather without losing any information, or permanently delete your Facebook account, which is the real deal.
- If you've started any groups, transfer admin rights to someone you trust.
- Send an email to your Facebook contacts explaining your decision to leave. Include your current contact information so they can get in touch with you without Facebook.
- If you plan to permanently delete, clear every last bit of information from your profile. Don't forget to remove your photos!
- Find alternatives to using Facebook. If you've gotten into the habit of using Facebook messages instead of email, update your email address book so you can get in touch with your friends next week and continue your correspondence outside of Facebook. A lot of people get addicted to Facebook because they check it when there's nothing else to do, like in between classes or during a lunch break; then the curiosity spills over into time that should be spent doing other things, like studying or working. Find something to do during those little windows of time in order to prevent relapse. There are several ways to give yourself a "Facebook patch":
- Stay away from the computer as much as you can. For many of us, getting in front of a monitor is a default activity. Try to find other things to do that'll keep you away from the computer and therefore, Facebook. Keep a notebook. Meditate. Finger-weave. Learn to do impressive tricks with a tech deck. Read a book. Call your friends on the phone or do something fun with them in-person. Anything that you can do anywhere and for short periods of time is good.
- If you're at a computer during critical relapse times, find another website to log onto and read instead of Facebook. Yes, you may get addicted to that instead, so try to find something that's actually a constructive pursuit, such as checking news sites, learning a new word each day, sharpening your mental skills by solving a sudoku, practicing that foreign language you decided to learn, or contributing to the How-to Manual Anyone Can Edit.
- Keep a list of your Facebook schedule (if you have one) and your non-Facebook goals with you and in front of you at all times.
- Once you've discovered your capacity for being addicted to Facebook, you should probably avoid other social networking sites like MySpace.
- As with any task that involves discipline, it always helps to do it with a friend. One option is to have a trusted family member or friend do this for you.
- If you are looking for a way to actively decrease the frequency of your Facebook visits, change your password to a long string of numbers. Write this down on a piece of paper, and place it somewhere that is annoying to reach or out of reach. This way, whenever you want to log on, you will need to dig out the paper for your password. This is to deter you from logging on by making it a chore. If you start to remember the numbers, just repeat the process.
- If you can't resist reactivating a deactivated your account, try this before you de-activate: open up notepad and type in some random text (lskdjfd). Login to Facebook and change your password. Copy the text that you just typed in notepad in the password fields and change your password. Deactivate your account and clear your clipboard history.
- To keep updated about your Facebook friends' status updates, subscribe to your friends' status updates RSS feed in your email program or other RSS reader that you already use. For example, you can get this feed in MS Outlook 2007 where you can read what your friends are up to along with your email. This eliminates one major reason people regularly log in to Facebook.
- Stop using Facebook Mobile to update your status etc. Un-install it from your phone if you have a downloaded version (i.e. iPhone, Palm etc.)
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