Diagnosis: Facebook addiction. Symptoms: mindlessly clicking away through albums, updating your status or putting off homework to chat away. The cure? Yet to be discovered.
Face it, our generation is addicted to Facebook. As this social networking site continues to consume the time of teens, many are developing ways to fight against their addiction.
Juniors Juliana Hakim, Anna Helmer and Paige Murray devised a plan to block Facebook from their lives for an entire week. They performed a password swap, where each person gave one another their password to change to prevent them from going on their account. From there, the three girls were not allowed to log on to the web site for an entire week.
It was Murray’s idea to swap passwords, in part so that she could focus more on school. “I was staying up really late a lot and my GPA wasn’t too great, so I wanted to make sure I got more sleep and finished all my assignments on time.”
At first, the three had a hard time getting used to coming home from school and not being able to go on Facebook. As the week progressed, they started realizing how much time they wasted on the social networking site every day.
“It was hard for the first day because I was so used to coming home and going on, but I got used to it,” Hakim stated.
“I used to go on Facebook on and off for like 4 hours, but after doing password swap I don’t go on nearly as much,” Murray added.
Whether it was to focus more on school or simply to improve time management, each of the teenagers benefited from the ban in different ways. “To be honest, I didn’t really use the extra time for homework, but I did have a lot more free time to watch TV and go out to eat,” Helmer said.
For those of you looking to decrease the time you waste on Facebook, following the “password swap” plan is one of many possibilities. While the team effort of the method can help you stay motivated, banning Facebook can be an individual goal as well. Here are some other solutions for saving some time:
Google Chrome Timer: It’s easy to log on and say you’re “only going to stay on for 20 minutes” and then spend the next two hours clicking away. Through “StayFocusd,” a Google Chrome extension, you can install a time setting for a specific site. Once your time is up, you will be not able to access the website for the rest of the day.
Go “offline”: Facebook’s chatting capabilities are limitless—and also the most distracting. Setting your chat settings to “offline” will keep you from engaging in endless conversations with your friends, pushing you to get off the computer even sooner.
Deactivate your account: If your addiction is really getting out of hand, a severe solution may be the only remedy. Muster up the courage to deactivate your account—you can always reactivate it once summer rolls around.