Patrick McDowell's Blog

Thoughts on my Facebook and Twitter Cleanse

By Patrick McDowell|Personal

About a month ago, I went on a one week facebook and twitter cleanse. As promised, I will share my thoughts on how it went, and what I learned.

Bottom line? You need to try this.

It was a bittersweet ordeal. The first few days were the hardest, I almost subconsciously found myself at the login page a number of times before I caught myself.  I didn’t realize how many times I had the urge to check up on friends and family in a single day. I felt like I was missing out… somehow disconnected. Fortunately that feeling was short lived. By the fourth day, I had almost forgotten about the sites entirely. By the seventh, I found myself questioning future usage of the services.

Looking back, it was a great learning experience. For one, I learned that many people overall don’t have a whole lot of interesting things to say. After the week was over, I found myself logging in only once a day, to catch highlights more or less. I wasn’t missing much.  Without the temptation, I found myself much more productive as well. I even started spending more time away from my PC, which is a good thing.

I should probably mention that the last two paragraphs were mostly pertaining to facebook. Twitter is a different story. To be frank, twitter I can do without. Very few of my friends actively use it, so the only people I end up keeping up with are superficial “friends” who could care less whether you posted updates or not – and are more likely to unfollow you over your lack of activity than anything else. Of course, there is also the spammers who plague the service and just make it more of an annoyance. People won’t follow you unless you follow them back, and everybody pretends to be interested in what everybody else has to say simply out of fear of being unfollowed. You can’t get ahead without playing the game, and the game isn’t worth my time.

Needless to say, you probably won’t find me updating twitter too much anymore. It was a fun little fad, but unless my friends and colleagues start using it more actively, I don’t see the point.

Facebook I will continue to use, although I find myself logging in a lot less. Like twitter, you still have to deal with the superficial BS, (particularly people you barely know wearing their heart on their sleeve), but at least you can say you met that person at one point or another.

Going on a One Week Facebook and Twitter Cleanse

By Patrick McDowell|Personal

If you are like me, you probably use twitter and facebook way too much. In fact, lately it has gotten to the point where I am beginning to think that visiting these sites is simply a “cognitive itch” of mine. When I realized how much it was cutting into my productivity, that was the last straw. Starting immediately, I will not log onto facebook or twitter for no less than one week.

I’m doing this for two reasons. Firstly (and most obviously) it has been taking up way to much of my time. Secondly, I need to prove to myself that I am as strong willed as I like to believe I am. I’ve got the fitness thing down, I’ve got the diet thing down, now I need to break this damn social networking habit!

I am posting status messages up now, notifying friends and family of my online absence. I thought about blocking the domains entirely, but then I realized that would be making it too easy on myself. This is a test of willpower, and I aim to succeed. I will however, continue blogging. I think that writing meaningful and well organized ideas are probably more interesting to you (and more meaningful to me) than a simple status update. I have linked feedburner to twitter, so you will see whatever blog posts I have recently written show up there as well. Alternatively, you can simply subscribe to my RSS feed.

I will compile my thoughts on this “cleanse”  into a new blog post when this is all over. I want to shoutout to Matt Cutts for the idea. Wish me luck!