How I Use Facebook

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

This is how I use Facebook, instead of letting Facebook use me.

1. I share things on my personal Facebook profile using extensions in my browser or on my iOS devices, sometimes using a third-party app like Buffer or Lately, sometimes using the native Facebook extension on iOS. But I rarely (if ever) go onto Facebook and share things there.
2. I go onto Facebook with missions rather than questions. I have tasks in Todoist that are labelled with the “social media” label and I’ll go into my various Facebook groups — like my TimeCrafting Trust membership community page — and my professional Facebook pages to share things deliberately. I go onto Facebook with a mission, complete the mission, and get out. I don’t look for things to do on Facebook. I have things to do on Facebook and I do them. Simple as that.
3. When I offer birthday wishes on Facebook (which I do often), I use a TextExpander snippet that brings a specific GIF up in the GIF search quickly. Then I share the GIF and that’s it. Sometimes that’s done publicly, sometimes via Messenger.
4. I will surf Facebook from time to time, but I only do it for short periods of time. I set a timer for that, usually 15 minutes or so. I start with missions not already in Todoist (like notifications in Facebook, for example) and then interact with my timeline a bit. The timer keeps me from getting sucked in and I do this no more than twice per day. That means I’m only giving 3% of my “wandering” waking hours to Facebook on weekdays. (Sometimes I do more on the weekends, but even if I give an hour of that time it only amounts to a little over 6%, given I’m awake for about 16 hours per day.)

That is how I use Facebook, instead of letting Facebook use me.

I spoke with Cal Newport about how I use Facebook, among other things, on this episode of my podcast.