How you can escape the Facebook habit and rediscover your creativity

A little over sixteen years ago an email appeared in my inbox.

It was from a then-unknown-to-me website named Facebook, and it said that an old friend of mine, one whom I had not heard from in a long time, had “added me as a friend” and that I could click through to confirm our friendship.

I had no idea what that meant and I hadn’t actually heard of Facebook at the time.

At that stage I was still naive enough to think that the act of adding a friend was something that took place on a human level, as it had done since the dawn of time.

I had just been introduced to social media.

I clicked the link and followed the instructions.

From that day until the day I walked away, Facebook was a part of my life.

That was my late 20s, all of my 30s and the beginning of my 40s.

Facebook gradually became the thing that I used to do just about everything.

It was the thing I used to keep in touch with people while I spent 15 years traveling around Asia.

It was the means of communication between my father and me while he lay dying in a hospital in Hong Kong and I was making excuses as to why I couldn’t make it back to see him.

It was the platform upon which my brother advised me of his death.

As my career matured and I moved into self-employment, it became a daily part of my marketing work (both for myself and for clients).

And, all these years later, it is something that I have spent many tens of thousands of dollars advertising on.

It was how I arranged my dates,

it was the place I stored photo albums from my travels,

It was where I announced the birth of my daughter.

Facebook was such an essential part of communication between me and my family that it wasn’t uncommon for members to have quite public, and rather embarrassing, exchanges when we were upset with each other.

It is a platform that I have given literally years of my life to.

It is also the thing that I have trusted with all those treasured parts of my history.

It was the first thing I did every morning and the last thing I did at night.

A few months ago I finally made the decision that something had to change.

I was stuck in a rut and really needed to get creative to trade out of it. When I looked at my life there was this one thing that served no purpose (apart from every purpose) that was taking up huge swathes of it and bearing no dividends.

It was time to quit the Facebook habit. It ended up not being quite as easy as simply signing out.

In the beginning

When I first signed up to Facebook it was a shadow of the site we know (and love-to-hate) today.

I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have real-time chat or notifications that displayed without refreshing the page.

We were all still running Windows XP because Vista was such awful trash and our environment was quite different from how it is now.

There was no cheap mobile data. We had Nokia telephones with tactile keypads that put words on the screen using something called T9.

Google had just acquired YouTube and there was very little video content online.

Most home deliveries were still arranged using a telephone, a telephone that was quite often wired to the wall.

We certainly didn’t have touch-screen smart phones and unlimited data. There were no app stores, notification bells or “ding ding” you’ve got a message.

We couldn’t pay for things with phones, the vast majority of people didn’t even get email on their phones.

Phones made calls and sent text messages. Most also had an alarm clock and a couple of games.

Signing up to a site like Facebook was an innocuous enough life choice. It required quite a bit of effort to interact with. I’m pretty sure the Newsfeed (which wasn’t then called the newsfeed) was still a chronological record of posts by your friends without a whole lot of algorithmic magic behind it.

It was a website. A website people would often spend too much time on but a website that you had to sit down at a computer and consciously visit. You needed to make time to do it, it wasn’t just sitting in your pocket.

The internet was still a thing that was largely tethered to our homes and places of business.

When I first started using it I didn’t even have an internet connection in my apartment. I would check it a couple of times a day from work, usually on lunch.

The message service was used more like email. In fact, instead of Facebook being a part of everything, most people would wait until they received an email advising them that they had a message or notification before even logging in.

I was working in management for a small hotel chain, it was a busy job, and the majority of my work took place off the Internet. In a time when office applications were still desktop applications that you purchased a license for and had for life, as opposed to things you subscribed to forever.

I also had an attention span and carried a lot less anxiety (you won’t understand just how much until you quit).

Facebook’s rise was not a sudden thing. Little things would change, the newsfeed for instance.

Messaging became instant and notifications more frequent and insistent.

Gradually it became the way that people communicated.

As Apple released the iPhone and the true era of smartphones was upon us, Mobile internet became more accessible and more reliable and the era of sleek black devices of glass and plastic that we carry in our pockets replaced the Nokia e63 or the BlackBerry.

For the first time ever phones had colour screens that were affordable enough for everyone to have one. We were gradually introduced to the pointy end of the attention economy.

Before we knew it, Messenger and Skype had basically replaced the telephone. Particularly for international calls. VOIP also came to the fore as international internet connectivity got more bandwidth.

Before we knew it there was an app for everything and all of them jostled for attention in our status bars. Devices that had once only actually rung or gone “beep beep” occasionally were now making a lot more noise.

We were all used to mobile phones by then, and we were conditioned to believe that when a phone rang or a message came in, we diverted our attention.

On the back of this attention revolution, Facebook quite literally took over most of our lives.

It was no longer a website. Instead an app (two once they separated Messenger). We no longer had to open a web browser and intentionally visit the website.

There was no more waiting for an email notifying you that someone had commented on something three hours ago.

All of a sudden we found ourselves immediately notified of everything. Each notification equally insistent but all with very different levels of intervention required.

Messenger then integrated with the SMS service on our phones.

It became the way we communicated.

As Facebook’s business integrations grew in number and in sophistication it was very quickly the tool I used for live chat on websites, it was the way I attracted clients to my businesses and it was also the way that I managed my personal and business reputations.

I would confirm attendance at events on it and not put them in my diary. All of a sudden it took over my calendar.

It became a part of everything I did. It became a part of everything we all did.

It was the way we judged each other.

It was how we knew how popular a band, restaurant (or person) was.

We got our news from it, formed, changed and defended our opinions on it.

We even put it in the dictionary:

Facebook Advertising became this unstoppable beast that suddenly appeared everywhere on the Internet. There were Facebook tracking pixels on websites that we would go to and re-targetted ads would appear.

All of a sudden a pair of shoes you’d briefly looked at or a business you’d searched for would appear in a Facebook ad. Influencing you to purchase something you may well not have purchased otherwise.

Local businesses gradually paid less attention to their websites, instead choosing to focus on a Facebook page to publish their news and services.

We then got the ability to rate those businesses and leave public reviews.

Facebook became incredibly influential in most of our lives and I don’t think most of us really noticed it happening. I certainly hadn’t. The first time I’d ever considered leaving the platform, the first time I’d even thought it might be an issue was now, sixteen years after I first signed up.

As a marketer I have to give credit to the machine that Zuck built. Marketing is all about capturing and holding attention. What he built was a way to break that attention down into something tangible and sell it to the highest bidder.

Marketing campaigns now follow a very similar formula. You’ll run a test to start to get an idea about what your conversion rate is, work out how many sales you want to make, and increase the marketing budget accordingly.

For some of the businesses I work with, their Facebook Advertising spend is their biggest expense. It consumes 30% of their revenue but it often brings in 90.

As a consumer who has been through that machine I’m less impressed. Most people see it as a free service, it costs them nothing and it’s hugely convenient. The problem with breaking that attention down into tiny, tangible bits is that it’s your attention their monetizing.

People generally aren’t all that good at doing two things at once, so that means that while you’re using their free service you’re paying with providing them attention to use to generate revenue while the other things you could or should be focusing on suffer.

Facebook has even become the place we buy and sell things, both through retail stores and community marketplaces.

Nearly 3 billion of us (36% of the people on earth) have created accounts on Facebook. All that attention that those people have provided has enabled Facebook to become a billion-dollar company. A tech unicorn, a true game changer.

Somehow, the creator of all this, Mark Zuckerberg is seen as a thought leader. Someone who meets with world leaders and advises government. He is one of the most powerful people earth.

He attained that rank in our society not by making meaningful change. Instead he attained by commoditising concentration and very subtly taking control of more and more of our daily lives.

This is the concentration that we used to use to focus on what really surrounds us. On our families, on productive work and on education. So for anyone who thinks that Facebook is free, it isn’t.

The personal cost of allowing it to take over is immense and it’s paid in our presence, it’s paid in money we never got the chance to earn and it’s paid in time we could’ve spent doing something more important.

If it’s true that the greatest resource we have is time, then the cost of Facebook is almost uncountable.

I can be a bit slow off the mark and as a result it obviously took sixteen years for me to become aware of any of this. When I realised that I was quite taken aback. To have not noticed the impact something originally so innocuous was having on my life for so long shows just how clever the machines that drive the attention economy are.

So I decided to see what life was like without Facebook.

The problem I had was that, unlike when I started, Facebook wasn’t just a website that you went to on a computer. It didn’t need some special effort to sit down and interact with.

It was literally everywhere.

Facebook was on my desktop,

my mobile phone,

the tablet I read the papers on,

my watch.

And so much of my life in turn was on Facebook.

My photographs,

photographs others had taken of me,

random thoughts I’d had about significant events,

debates and discussions,

my friends’ birthdays,

a directory of the businesses I use and a record of my communications with them,

important company records about advertising spend.

The list went on and on.

Facebook was literally everywhere I looked.

For many people, who use it to login to a host of other sites on the Internet, it even represents a significant portion of their actual identity.

All of this is held by a private company that has no business model if you remain focused on anything but it.

From a business perspective there were some practical matters I had to attend to. It was the major source of traffic for most of my websites, the combined revenue from which I use to live.

That meant a bit of planning was required. I had to reorganise the way I did social media for the business. I had to get it off any websites I had used SSO on (there weren’t many) and I had to download and safely archive all the information and images that I had posted over the years.

At first I figured making it quiet would do the trick.

I muted notifications on all my devices, signed out of every browser session, auto-filtered notification emails to archive in Gmail.

I completely silenced it.

As long as I didn’t deliberately open an app, or a browser window and consciously log in (and why would I do that?) there was no way for me to know that anything had happened.

Unfortunately it was not nearly as easy as I thought. It was actually almost as hard to give up as smoking was. My brain had buried the habit so deep that I was not even aware that it was happening most of the time.

Even with everything off, I kept finding myself on Facebook. My brain had learned that whenever there was any down time, whenever my thoughts started to wander, a device had to be immediately engaged and Facebook was the purpose of that device.

I often wouldn’t snap out of it until I’d not only logged in but also spent a good half an hour lost in the narcissistic rambling of 1,000 people, all over the world, that I barely knew.

This is when I realised just how much creativity I’d sacrificed.

It’s when the mind wanders that ideas form and grow. Because that space in between doing one thing and another was always filled, and filled with lots of useless information, I was processing all this noise and completely losing my own signal.

Creativity is at the core of everything I do. Be it writing, be it coding or be it cooking dinner. I am astonished just how hard I’ve made that process for myself by giving my attention to Facebook.

I had to find a way to completely break the habit and there was only I could come up with.

The military option

I uninstalled all the apps from all the devices, edited the hosts file on my laptop for when I was away from home and blocked Facebook and all her domains on my home network entirely.

It is now impossible for anyone connected to my home router to use Facebook or Messenger. It is also impossible for anyone to fall victim to a tracking pixel (well, the Facebook one anyway).

I still found myself trying to go to Facebook regularly. It was a good three to four weeks before it was completely out of my system. Each time I tried to visit it would 404 and gradually my brain stopped associating it with something that had to happen during downtime.

At first I noticed similar patterns forming (filling the Facebook void) around other sites such as Reddit and Twitter as well. I use both extensively. Whereas normally I would be going to those sites to actively engage in discussion, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through them like I used to with Facebook.

I ended up limiting access to both of those as well until I was on the other side. All-in-all it took me about six weeks to train myself to so starkly change the way I interacted with the world.

So what has happened since?

I hardly touch my phone when I’m at my desk and I have lot less browser tab fatigue as well, primarily because I have only got the things I need to work on open.

My phone battery can last three days without a charge if I’m on a desk heavy project.

I’m not disturbed 100 times a day by my smartwatch telling me who just took a photo of their dinner. And my work has increased in both quality and quantity.

A lot of half-started things that I had on the books very quickly came together. I’ve gone through everything methodically.

This has lead to a lot less anxiety about what I have and haven’t done and a far better grasp of what needs to be done.

I feel like I’m communicating more effectively. Let’s face it, a lot of the chats you have with your mates on Facebook Messenger aren’t that consequential.

You don’t need to message your bestie every time you get stuck in traffic or someone does something stupid at the office. The point I’m making is that 90% of the communicating I had been doing was no longer happening and no one really noticed it had gone anywhere.

I got in the habit of giving friends a ring once a week or going for a visit instead of a constant stream of back and forth. On those phone calls and visits I was able to focus on the conversation without being in four different chats at once.

There was immediately more value in all my communication. There was more value in it because it had purpose, it was not just some stream of information without any function.

I’ve written all this down because the entire process of realisation and re-experiencing focus has been so incredible to me and I began to wonder how many other people just don’t realise what they’re sacrificing.

I can only hope that I can help one person realise the price they pay to be the commodity.

If you’ve ever considered quitting Facebook (or you haven’t but somehow you’re here anyway) and wondered what it’s like, it’s quite terrifying at first. Especially when you’ve been on it for half (or all of) your life.

The corners it gets into are all over the place. I mean literally everywhere.

For that reason, and for the habitual nature of Facebook use, you can expect to end up having a bit of a fight with yourself.

I threw myself plenty of objections. One thing about breaking habits (be they smoking or Facebook), it’s not easy. Retraining your body not to do something that it has already filed away and automated is far harder than getting a habit in the first place.

Here are a few of them and how I handled them:

I use it for work

I stepped back from all my personal work-related social media and handed 100% of it off to a virtual assistant. We meet once a week to discuss the mechanics of the calendars and I get a report each Friday on everything that has been done.

I should’ve done this a long time ago and I’m definitely not complaining.

The VA is also dealing with any business messenger activity.

I know this isn’t going to be the solution for everyone. If it’s something that you have to use as a part of your job my best advice would be to ensure you use a separate business Facebook account and that you keep it strictly business.

Business activity on Facebook can mostly be scheduled in advance so you can do everything you need to do in one set block of time each day and by ensuring that your business account has no crossover into your personal life you won’t be distracted by your friends’ inane posts.

But how will I communicate without messenger? All my friends are on it!

I spent a lot of time chatting on messenger so I figured that losing it would make a huge dent in my ability to communicate with people. As with many things about coming off Facebook, the actual result is counter-intuitive.

I ended up having better, more focused and meaningful conversations. Instead of messaging someone and saying that the hotel room I was in was stunning and sending the requisite get jealous photos. I did nothing, I just enjoyed the hotel room.

Experiences became things I experienced rather than things I raced to message people or post about. The impact of this was quite profound.

Once I snapped out of the habitual nature of my use, which was a little difficult as I described, there was no part of my life that suffered at all. Most areas have improved.

Including my communications.

So many of the conversations that took place on messenger were unnecessary. They contributed nothing to my productivity and, often, were counter productive or negative in nature.

There were a few people I’d met on my travels that I wanted to keep in touch with and I had to make arrangements to contact them. It took me about fifteen minutes one morning to go through my friends list and copy / paste a message with an email address and a functioning WhatsApp account.

I have not lost touch with anyone. If anything I speak with them more now.

The value and quality of my communication increased on all fronts.

What about all my photos, posts and messages?

You can download an archive of 100% of your posts from the Facebook Settings Menu. Here’s a a guide from CNBC.

It’s then super easy to then save them on your device and sync them with your favourite cloud.

All your posts, messenger history and anything other content you’ve created on the platform since you started your account is included in the archive too.

As much as this will be one of the biggest things you’ll worry about, if you’re anything like me, the archive will remain unzipped on your backup drive months later.

The mechanics of breaking out of the Facebook feedback loop

I didn’t actually delete my account. Mainly because of my Facebook advertising account. I did uninstall all the apps and make the site extremely difficult to access.

If you choose to do this instead of deleting your account you’re going to have some notification emails to deal with. These start as a flood and then die out by themselves. I’d suggest filtering them straight to archive or junk anyway, especially at first, you’re going to need all the help you can get not to get sucked back in.

I took the step of actually making the entire domain inaccessible on my home network. I run a pi-hole which takes care of my DNS and makes blacklisting super easy but most routers will also allow you to block specific domains from the admin panel.

If you’re not lucky enough to be in complete control of your home network or you have people you share it with that are likely to still want access, you can also block at device level.

For computers you can edit your hosts file by adding the line:

127.0.0.1 Facebook.com

Depending on your operating system, it will require a slightly different procedure.

Here are instructions for Windows, Mac & Linux.

You’ll also want to do the above on any devices that you regularly take away from your home network (like I did with my laptop) even if you can block it at LAN level.

Finally you’ll want to block Facebook.com on your mobile phone. Here’s how to do it on an iPhone and on an Android device.

This last step might seem like overkill but skip it at your peril. You need to remove the apps, delete saved passwords and force your device to throw an error each time it tries to interact with Facebook to gradually retrain your mind not to check it so often.

I can’t name one single thing that got worse as a result of me disconnecting Facebook and I encourage you to try it for yourself! Looking back now at the amount I used to use it I am quite sure I must’ve been mad.