On episode 38 of Think Digital Podcast, we are going to be talking about what I learned from banning myself from Facebook. 

Before we go ahead, I want you to understand that I’m not trying to demonize the usage of Facebook because there’s a lot of that going around in the media lately. 

Facebook is awesome in most instances but the creators might have created something so big and so vast that there is no simple way to control it. From Privacy gap to data breaches, it just shows that controlling it might be a bit difficult.

But in the end, it all boils down to us. We are the ones who choose whether we use Facebook or not; the power lies in our hands. I love a particular quote from this episode.

"Technology reveals who we are, it doesn't alter our fundamental character, it simply aggravates it."

Every quarter, I perform a task audit to evaluate myself. It was during this period that I found out I was turning to Facebook a lot. 

I realized that I was spending a lot of unproductive time on Facebook and it was affecting the time that I should be spending with;

• My family
• Myself
• Friends
• My growth 

Facebook was taking a lot from me and I knew that it wasn’t Facebook's fault, it was mine. I was the one spending a lot of time in the app. And I knew that I needed to find a way to stop.

The first thing I did was to delete the app from my phone and my iPad because I realized that I made use of Facebook on my mobile phones a lot. 

Also, I understood that just deleting the app wouldn’t be enough to curb my addiction because there were numerous ways to bypass that inconvenience. So, the next thing I did was to blacklist the domain in my device settings, both on mobile and on my desktop. 

Once I did this, I Literally could not get to Facebook unless I decided to change the settings which required a number of steps that I wasn’t ready for. 

The only place that I could access Facebook was my laptop. The reason was simple, I use my laptop for most of my heavy lifting projects and it wasn't as tempting for me to use Facebook on my laptop unlike my mobile devices, where it was easy for me to scroll through mindlessly.

I learned a lot of lessons from banning myself from Facebook and here they are:

1. You don’t need access to Facebook to do your job. 09:12
2. I was using Facebook as a coping mechanism. 12:49
3. Facebook was a distraction. 17:57

During this period, I understood something very important, something I wouldn’t have realized if I hadn’t banned myself from using Facebook;

“Facebook is a Social Media platform, it is not life, it is not needed, it is not essential, it is a nice-to-have not a have-to-have.