I love Facebook. I have family and good friends all over the globe, and it is a great tool for staying in touch with them far more often and more easily than I would otherwise be able to. I love being able to see pictures of my friend and her children as they play and grow in far-away Indonesia. I love being able to know what my mom is up to or thinking about across the Atlantic in Germany on a day when I might not normally be able to talk to her. I love hearing news from friends back in Louisville and not being totally out of the loop when we go back to visit. I love having an easy way to interact with local friends about their thoughts or upcoming events. And I love that it's all in one place.
But several months ago, I realized that my Facebook usage was causing me to regularly lose focus on the things I was responsible for in my own home, with the very real people and things in my immediate environment. It's not easy to teach the kids to focus on their schoolwork when Mom is busy taking a momentary break to check her Facebook. And it's not easy to carry on a deep conversation with my husband when I'm also trying to engage with the pithy saying some friend posted on their wall. Try getting the house cleaned up while also making sure to check every 15 minutes if someone's responded to your message. Trust me--it doesn't work too well!
So I had to ask myself: Why am I on Facebook? If Facebook is a tool--and that is what it is!--what am I using it for, and what do I want it to do for me? Am I master over my Facebook, or is it master over me? And then, once I've decided what kind of tool it is, what are practical steps I can take to keep it a useful tool, and not a waste of time? Now your answer to what kind of tool it is may be a bit different from mine, so your practical steps may differ, too. But I'd encourage you to ask yourself those questions and then make a list of ways to keep Facebook as something you are master over, rather then slave to.
I've decided that for me, Facebook is primarily a communication tool to stay in touch with the people I care about, not unlike email, aside from being faster, more public, and having the added bonus of lots of pictures.
So I decided to take a few practical steps to make Facebook do for me what I want it to do:
1) I cut my friends' list down once or twice a year. A few months ago, I had it down to 100 (it has crept up slightly). If Facebook is a tool in my relationships with people I care about, then I want my friends' list to reflect that. I don't need to know what every single person I've known since I was 2 is currently doing. It has little to no lasting value, and I find it makes much less time for the people I'm close to. Yes, I occasionally look up an old friend I've lost touch with (and I have rekindled at least one friendship that way--as in, we actually get together face-to-face sometimes). Yes, I occasionally add someone I've just met, in the hope that I will get to know them better. But I want my Facebook to be about the people I would want to invest time and energy in, even if Facebook didn't exist. So I keep my friends' list fairly short.
2) I am selective about my news feed. There are a few people I want to keep in contact with, and whom I genuinely care about, but whose regular postings are unhelpful. I hide them from my news feed so that I'm not bombarded with these links every time I log in. I do this with people who consistently post critical and/or depressing things, too. It's not that I'm against critiquing things, or being real about trials in your life. I'm not! And when genuine friends mention genuine suffering on their Facebook wall, it helps me know how to pray for them. But it is not helpful to me, or to my view of others, when people use their wall as a great big gripe about the world. It doesn't help me think well of those people. So I hide that stuff. Then I can send them messages or visit their wall when I want to, and not when Facebook wants me to.
For the people I'm closest to, I also ask Facebook to show me more of what they post, and less of the postings of people who are a bit more peripheral, so that my news feed better reflects the amount of investment I would otherwise make in these various relationships. It's most important to me to keep in touch with my family, local church members and a few other dear friends. So just like these are the people I make more time for outside of Facebook, I make more time for them on Facebook.
3) I schedule my Facebook time. I decided a few months ago that as a general rule, I was going to visit Facebook once a day. It's not a legalistic rule--I break it occasionally when I'm having a more leisurely day. But my general routine is to visit Facebook once in the morning, do my commenting and message writing, and then be done with it until the next day. Because honestly, when you only have 100 friends, some of whom don't show up on your news feed, there's not that much to check that can't wait until tomorrow, unless, of course, I am in a running comment or message streak about something that is happening today, in which case, I break my rule. But actually, even when I am responding for the 5th time in a day to a message, I try to keep my news feed visits to one a day. This leaves a lot more time in my computer usage (yes, I try to schedule that, too) for more personal emails, important tasks, and reading blogs that will help me in my walk with God. This also helps keep me from being more attentive to Facebook than I am to my immediate family. And I've found that whereas before I limited my time, when I was away from the computer for a few days I couldn't wait to get back to Facebook, I no longer feel the need to jump right back on after after a couple days away.
Now you may use Facebook more for networking, in which case, having lots of "friends" is probably helpful. And I'm sure there are other legitimate uses where these kind of things would not apply. I'm not saying that if you follow Steps 1, 2 and 3, you'll be doing it the "right" way. This is just how I decided Facebook needed to work for me. And I'd be lying if I said that I was always master of my Facebook time. Part of my incentive to write this down is to help me remember these things. But if you're not sure if you spend too much time facebooking (and especially if you are sure that you spend too much time there!), I'd encourage you to think and pray about what kind of tool Facebook should be for you, and then write down and stick to practical steps that will make it a tool that serves you, rather than hinders you.
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