How to Manage Your Sanity without Quitting Facebook

I can’t quit Facebook.

No. I’m not compelled by the annoying online games, the rash of passive aggressive complainers or the myriad of cat photos.

I’m beyond all that.

I elect to use Facebook as a tool to share and read about interesting tidbits in the realm of design, cartooning and illustration with my friends, my peers and my students. In that use case, it has been helpful. And, let’s face it – I also use it for a little social promotion. But in the last few months, I’ve found myself spending more and more time “checking Facebook” and getting lost in the noise. Checking Facebook had turned into a habit more than anything else. It had become a crutch. A time sink. And I was feeling the effects.

On Monday, I finally decided to do something about it. First and foremost, I deleted the Facebook app from my smartphone. Three days in, and I don’t miss having Facebook on my phone. It felt liberating, actually.

And that was just the start. Next, I installed Social Fixer – a web extension that actually makes my Facebook experience much more tolerable. (Side note: I’d like to give a hat tip to my cartoonist pal Will Terrell for letting me know about it.)

Social Fixer works on Safari, Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox. With Social Fixer, I can hide parts of the page I don’t want to see (like Chat), hide posts I’ve already read, show full pictures by hovering over them and switch my feed to only show the Most Recent news. Social Fixer also lets you customize the look and feel through custom CSS, but I don’t really care about that. Best of all, I can hide stories by keyword, author, and application. No more game invites, no more politics, and no more links to anything from BuzzFeed.

I call that a major win.

While I can’t quit Facebook cold turkey, deleting the app from my smartphone and using Social Fixer have helped make my Facebook experience much more manageable.

-Krishna