There are some mistakes you make on Facebook that, frankly, nobody but your psychiatrist can help you with… but the other mistakes? There might be some hope. The average Facebook user arrives without training or savvy as to how the site works or what the pitfalls are. We’ve all seen the novice who says “yes” to every single app, accepts every friend request, joins every group and then posts status updates about how his/her Facebook is out of control. Poor n00bs.
Lifehacker has taken a look at ways to get your Facebook experience under control and, more importantly, to put an end to our dumb mistakes. From auditing your approved apps to filtering your news feeds to managing your privacy settings, you could be having a better Facebook experience overall and greatly improving the signal to noise ratio. In fact, Lifehacker even goes so far as to help you pull the plug if you need to. Kinda:
You can quit Facebook without actually quitting Facebook, effectively making it a lot less distracting. This means disabling a lot of features and locking down your privacy settings (as we’ve previously discussed). If that’s too much for you, start tracking the time you spend online and see when you use Facebook the most. Doing so can help you reclaim your time and start using it more effectively. This way you can still use Facebook, but you can avoid it at the times it hurts your productivity the most. If you can pull that off, you’ll get the best of both worlds.
Facebook may not make up the entire web, but it’s the backbone of many core services and connections for countless sites and resources. Hey, you may say you don’t have the time to sit around streamlining your Facebook experience, but you may want to ask yourself if you have the time not to.
Source: Lifehacker
