Facebook has many positive features that have a good impact on our lives – it helps us to stay in touch with our friends and families, it makes sure we remember birthdays and anniversaries, it allows us to display our relationship status (and maybe alter it through the time-tested ‘poking’ method of flirting), it lets us show our loved ones photos of holidays, babies and adventures without having to develop photos or travel and it gives us accountability for our actions (yay… accountability…). Almost everyone now has Facebook and when you meet someone in a bar you’re just as likely to ask if they have Facebook as you are to exchange numbers and many of the Facebook ‘terms’ have found their way into our popular lexicon such as ‘poke’, ‘tag’ and ‘falk’.

It’s not all good though, and some people have issues with Facebook’s potential use for invasion of privacy or for its ability to ruin your reputation with every single person you know through one unfortunate photo. More to the point, Facebook damages productivity rather seriously and many people suffer almost a ‘Facebook addiction’ leading many companies to block their staff from accessing the site.

When you first come online, whether you’re at home or in the office, chances are the first thing you’ll check your Facebook for updates. Once you’ve done this (and are normally disappointed) you may well spend five minutes browsing over what your friends and family have been doing. Then you close the window and get down to work, and it wouldn’t be a problem except then ten minutes later you may find yourself absent-mindedly checking Facebook again to see if you have any updates now. Then you might chat to a colleague (who’s probably sitting next to you) on Facebook chat, and poke someone from Uni that you still sort of fancy. Then ten minutes more work, then back onto Facebook to update your status to something funny or witty you just thought of. If this sounds like you, chances are you’ve got a Facebook addiction… Hi my name’s Jeff, and I’m addicted to Facebook.

The amount of time you can waste on your Facebook addiction is gigantic, and the reason for this is that it provides social contact. As social beings, we crave social interaction and with Facebook at our beck and call it gives us just that whenever we want it. The problem is the amount it affects our work, and the disappointment we feel when we check it to find no updates – of course if you check every two minutes there isn’t going to be much new going on!

The solution then is to identify the problem and to set yourself a limit on how often you can check Facebook. For example maybe you can only do it once every three hours, or only in the morning and again during your lunch break. This way, not only will you get more work done, but you’ll also have more to look at when you do sign in.

Alternatively you can set up your phone to receive Facebook updates and this way you won’t need to visit the site to constantly check. If you have 3G on your mobile you can set up object push on your e-mail meaning it’ll regularly check for new posts giving you free Facebook alerts. The final solution however remains to block your computer from accessing Facebook and stop the problem completely.

Mack LeMouse

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