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Facebook is an extremely useful website - it helps us keep in touch with our friends, follow the news and learn a lot of new things. But at the same time it is the biggest waster of your time after the TV. It takes our time and kills our effectiveness. So how can you avoid wasting time on Facebook? Surely, you’ve tried spending less time there, but you failed. After all, you would not be reading this article, if you had succeeded, would you? =) We tried to collect the maximum of simple and practical tips that will help you change your habits.

First of all we’ll cheer you up, you are not alone! Most people realize that social networks take too much time:

According to a recent report from Pew Research, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the USA (27%) plan to spend less time on the social network in 2013 than in 2012. And 61% of users report having taken a ‘Facebook vacation’ where they stopped using the site for several weeks.

source: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2013/02/are-you-spending-less-time-on-facebook-27-of-users-plan-to-in-2013/

But:

Everybody knows Facebook is a waste of time, but they can’t stop going on it.

— LikeHack (@MyLikeHack) February 27, 2013

The thing is that the creators of social networks have studied their users rather well. Moreover, they are interested in making you stay a lot longer on Facebook. Then they would be able to show you more ads and thus make more money! But let’s not judge them, they honestly earn this money by providing us with a very convenient service. It’s more important that there are many intricate triggers that make you either stay or get back to a social network. This effect is further doubled by application developers who also want you to use their products on a regular basis and therefore constantly send you reminders and notices.

That is why it is so hard to close the tab with a social network and do something useful at last. But following just a few simple steps below will allow you to reduce the influence of distracting triggers and escape from the social web.

We would like to start with a short introductory video, where Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb.com talks about her personal rules of Facebook-diet:

Now, 4 steps you need to follow to stop wasting your priceless time on Facebook:

Disable all notifications

When someone sends you a request, you may not be able to see the full details of the request. You may wonder if it’s important, or interesting. But if you really just want to check out the networks and not get completely into the more frivolous activities (playing vampires, werewolves, and joining/liking/subscribing to fan page after fan page just because for example) then don’t feel you have to respond to those requests. They do take time.

source: http://www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Wasting-Time-on-Facebook

First you need to get to the Settings section. Cunning developers left the button in sight, but made it as inconspicuous as possible. Click on the gear in the upper right corner and select Account Settings.

After it go to Notifications:

We are primarily interested in the section “How I get notifications”. Here we can turn off notifications via SMS, e-mail and make the notifications on the website less annoying. First, let’s turn off the sound that accompanies website notifications. If you have Facebook opened in one of your tabs, you will no longer be distracted to see what happened there.

Secondly, enable e-mail notifications only for events relating to the security of your account or your personal data. You will still get notifications if something goes seriously wrong, but constant invitations to see new photos from a picnic will not bother you anymore.

And finally, if you have your phone number linked, turn off all phone notifications.

The second part of options - “What you get notified about” - is much bigger. Here you can set up people on whose activity you can receive notifications, disable notifications from the pages where you are a subscriber or an administrator. We advise to get notifications only from your friends and turn off notifications from all pages. If you want to read something particular, you can visit the page at any time.

You can also disable the notifications directly from notifications panel. If you click on this cross, you will be offered to unsubscribe from all notifications about this person or page. So if you have annoying and too active friends - you can keep them completely out of sight.

Mobile Applications

First of all, it is better to completely remove the mobile application from your smartphone. If you can’t do this - think again, maybe the reason is not that important? Think whether it may cost you money, relationships or time? If it won’t or the possible damage seems insignificant - then quickly press DELETE button.

If you still have decided that you need an application on your phone - do the following. Go to Settings of your Facebook application and uncheck Notifications. After that your smartphone will cease to vibrate every time your friend leaves a comment to the photo of a funny cat.

Opinion from the Web (randomli.com):

Well, this is what I don’t understand. Most peopel don’t realize how much time they really spend on facebook. If somebody were to tell you that they spent hours on any other site, simply clicking around not really ‘doing’ anything, you’d look on them and ask them if they were MAD. But, for some reason on facebook it’s perfectly acceptable to spend hours doing absolutely nothing productive at all. I’ve literally sat beside people who have sat in front of their laptops and for at least an hour did nothing but browse through party pics, profile pics and status updates on facebook.
Viral videos are fun, reading a few online comic strips are fun, leaving a reply or two to some witty facebook updates are fun, but people, sitting down for hours on end (even if it’s not at all at once) is nothing short of a waste of time.

Remove all games and applications

Playing games, decorating your profile 2-3 times a day, and rating your friends will suck up your time before you know it.

Remember: Each invitation to install an application (e.g. to accept a gift, to recognize someone’s selection of you as their BFF, etc) includes an option to ignore all requests from the application in question. Clicking this will suppress those really obnoxious and/or annoying requests

source: http://www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Wasting-Time-on-Facebook

Besides the fact that games do not bring you anything good and waste your time, they also send you regular notifications on what is going on with your game account. Many people consider casual games to be a harmless way to relax that does not take a lot of time, but this is not true. Studies show that the most active users of social networks spend most of their time playing games. Games for Facebook and other social networks are always created with purpose to take as much of your time as possible. So if you want to poke the buttons sometimes – you’d better create an account at one of the services with educational games like Lumosity.

Opinion from the Web (randomli.com):

As I said in the beginning I like Facebook (and twitter), it’s a great TOOL for a variety of things! But that’s all it is – A TOOL! Make the best use of it and the move on to something a little more productive. Or better yet, something that you’ll really enjoy and have memories of. I don’t think 5 years from now, you’ll remember the day you got that shiny new barn in Farmville!

Turn off chat.

How often were you just going to close the tab and go to sleep when someone suddenly started to chat with you and you spent another hour and a half on this? Or when you logged in for just a couple of seconds to check whether you received an important response and then you got stuck in the useless dialogue instead of returning to your business? Turn off chat to prevent this from happening. Other users will not see that you’re online and those who really need you can send messages in the old way.

To turn it off, click on the gear at the bottom and select Turn Off Chat:

These 4 basic steps will help you get rid of the habit of “hanging out” on Facebook.

We’d like to warn you – do not do these things if networking is a part of your work. If you are a trendsetter and should always be at the forefront, then you certainly do not need to remove mobile applications and limit the list of your friends. But you can still do one small thing:

Check social networks on schedule. Develop the habit to do this and don’t visit social networks at any other time. Twitter may be an exception, because the speed is often crucial there. But don’t pretend to be a CNN editor and try to find out about everything before others. Profits from constant monitoring of news flows may not be worth the time.

So stop wasting your time and do something useful. Or at least something fun:

P.S. Of course, the most reliable way to stop wasting time on Facebook is to delete your account. You can permanently delete your Facebook profile with the help of this link: http://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

and this video

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