My social networking world

The past couple of weeks have seen my free time dwindle somewhat.  More to do, longer working hours, bugs, deadlines, pressures, darker nights – all fighting for my available free minutes, and causing the eyelid clamps to work harder to keep me awake.

I felt some small changes were required, and the miscellaneous periphery took the first blow of the axe.  I finally took the decision to deactivate my FaceBook account.  I’ve previously mentioned that FaceBook isn’t right for me, and giving me back five to ten minutes each day made the cull worthwhile.  I’m not yet missing it, after two and a half days, so I think it’s a fairly permanent change.

They certainly don’t make it easy to deactivate your account – I’m sure there were five separate steps, and that’s after finding where to do it, and it doesn’t include unsubscribing from all the updates!  I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to actually delete the account.

Reactivating the account, they make fairly simple though – “Just log back in” they say.  Why no hoops of flaming accelerant to leap through here?  I guess subscriber retention is something they’re good at.  With their latest published accounts not looking so good, I’m not that surprised that they want to keep their numbers up.

After FaceBook, I hit Twitter.  I culled the accounts I follow by over 50% – that’s another ten to fifteen minutes each day I’ve got back – I’m still following a few though, so there’s room for a bit more!  🙂

LinkedIn comes next – I may only save less than a minute a day, but I’ve removed the bookmarks from my browsers so I shouldn’t even be looking there now!

Google Plus.  My favourite social networking tool took less of a hit, but I’ve still taken a few accounts out of my circles, leaving me with a nice lean stream of accounts I’m more interested in.

I’ve even been unsubscribing from marketing emails that I’ve signed up for over the years.  There may not be many, and hitting delete may not take long, but each 5 seconds I’ve saved myself gives me a great feeling of relief.

Of course, writing this post has probably used up more than my saved quota for this week, but I don’t miss anything if I don’t open my blog once or twice a day.  I think spending some time writing on here might give me some of my life back….  🙂

The Zoo Keeper

By TheZooKeeper

An Azure Cloud Architect with a background in messaging and infrastructure (Wintel). Bearded dog parent who likes chocolate, doughnuts and Frank's RedHot sauce, but has not yet attempted to try all three in combination!

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