Facebook Addiction: How to do a Social Media Detox be more Productive

Although one of the most popular subjects online these days is ‘the ways of promoting your business through social media’ and it is a fact that Facebook has helped business owners around the world by opening up new doors to targeted ways of promoting products changing the way we communicate, there is a very negative side to social media, as it is proving more and more to be turning into an addiction for a big percentage of the users.

While promoting your business on Facebook in the right manner is good, getting addicted to Facebook and spending hours upon hours aimlessly wondering around social media, is wasting your precious time and harming your productivity and your work/business.

How to Deal with Facebook Addiction

The first step in dealing with social media addiction is recognizing the signs that you are addicted to Facebook (or Twitter and other social media). Here are the main signs:

1. You obsessively check Facebook and certain other websites (ie Twitter, Yahoo etc) while you are on your computer working. Your Facebook window is constantly open on your browser, you get destructed every time new messages/notifications come up and you stop your work every few minutes to check them. Even when you are not on your computer, you feel the need to check Facebook often during the day through your mobile device.

2. Facebook is the first page you check as soon as you wake up in the morning and before you sleep at night.

3. You are not able to go for a day without Facebook. If you have to, you start feeling Facebook withdrawal symptoms and you crave going to a computer and checking the updates.

If you are recognizing the above symptoms on yourself, you are in danger of a major social media addiction as you are probably wasting hours and hours aimlessly wondering on social media, rather than using the productive time for your work or for socializing with your friends, business associates and family in real life.

I have done some research and would like to introduce you to some amazing Detox tools!

Here are the basic steps to combating your addiction:

1. Decide the value of Facebook and Social Media to you and how you want it to contribute to your life and work/business.

2. Decide how much time per day or per week you really need to be on social media to interact with friends and promote your work with more meaningful connections. Be strict with yourself, probably half or one hour per day on social media and news sites is more than enough to get your message through and stay informed.

3. Block all time wasting useless applications like Mafia Wars, FarmVille etc and block any new application requests. Clear your profile from pages and groups that spam you, as you don’t have time to read irrelevant messages.

4. THE SOCIAL MEDIA DETOX MEDICINE: On step 2 I asked you to decide how much time per day you really need to spend on social media (Facebook, Twitter etc) and other time wasting sites (like yahoo.com, cnn.com etc). Now I introduce the best ‘medicine’ that I find, which you need to take at the specific times each day. Its called LeechBlock, it has worked wonders with me and its totally F-R-E-E!

Download the Firefox web browser (www.firefox.com) and use Leechblock to block certain sites (ie Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc) entirely for set periods during the day.

You can specify up to six sets of sites to block, with different times and days for each set. You can block sites within fixed time periods (e.g., between 9am and 5pm), after a time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour), or with a combination of time periods and time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour between 9am and 5pm). You can also set a password for access to the extension options, just to slow you down in moments of weakness!

LeechBlock also keeps track of the total amount of time you have spent browsing the sites in each block set.

For more information and latest version, go to: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html

5. Additional Monitoring Tools: Rescue Time – This is a Time management software that shows you how you spend your time & provides tools to help you be more productive (like a pop-up box on your screen reminding you to get back to work when you are wasting your time). Again, this is free software that helps you monitor your productivity and see how much time you really spend on unproductive sites.

To deal with social media addiction, I suggest you use Leechblock asap and the additional tools like Rescue Time to get more insight on how you spend your time so that you improve your productivity.

If you have enjoyed this post, help me spread the word by sharing with your Facebook and Twitter addicted friends! 🙂