Facebook is ubiquitous. Over 2 billion of us use it, almost a third of the human population. Love it or loathe it Facebook is inescapable.
The notifications grab your attention. Your friend has posted a new status update, you’ve been poked by a crush, your mom has liked one of your drunk weekend photos. You need to know more. But it’s the neverending personalised Facebook News Feed that keeps you locked in. Each scroll could show another gem of news, fresh relationship gossip or a cute baby photo.
The average Facebook user spends 41 minutes on the social network each day. Over 10 whole days a year! We’re addicted.
Today’s strategy is recommended by Louis Barclay, creator of Nudge. With Louis’ one strategy your Facebook accounts will be silenced putting you back in the driving seat.
If you’re worried about spending too much time on Facebook, one of the most effective things you can do is unfollow every single friend, page and group in your News Feed. That might sound a bit extreme, but you’ll still be able to access all that same content if you want – only instead of Facebook pushing pictures of your friend’s cat’s wedding on you, it’s up to you to seek them out.
Just to clarify here, I’m talking about unfollowing, not unfriending. You still have everything and everyone on your Facebook, but by unfollowing everything you basically delete your News Feed across all platforms and devices, which means you escape the addictive heart of Facebook. The News Feed literally shows as a blank space.
I did this three years ago and now I spend precisely zero time compulsively scrolling through the bafflingly crap News Feed. If you’d rather still follow people, I still suggest that it’s infinitely better to go to zero first and then build back up. Deleting my News Feed by unfollowing everything was so transformative that I built it into my anti-addiction Chrome extension, Nudge. So if you want to take back control of Facebook but don’t know where to start, use Nudge to delete your News Feed.
Today's article was written by Louis Barclay, creator of Nudge. Nudge is a Chrome extension which helps people overcome internet addiction, by doing things like switching off addictive sites by default, showing you visually how long you spend on sites, and deleting your Facebook News Feed.
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