The title of this post is misleading. That’s rather intentional, but I’m trying an experiment and I’m officially on day two with total success.

That experiment? No longer checking Facebook on my iPhone.

Some of you will read that and immediately understand why I’m doing this. For those of you who don’t, let me explain:

I’m not completely withdrawing from Facebook. As much as I want to trash my account sometimes, I do enjoy staying in some kind of touch with people I wouldn’t be in touch with otherwise, even if it means liking their latest cat picture or whatever. So my goal, now, is to check it on my computer in the mornings if I have time before work, and then sometime before bed after I get home from work.

That’s it.

Before, I’d pull up the FB app on my iPhone and through-out the day, browse through my news feed to stay caught up. When you follow a lot of feeds, this becomes important, simply because if you don’t stay caught up (every minute of every day), there’s a LOT to sift through.

However: the iPhone app is getting increasingly unreliable. It takes two minutes (long, I know!) just to load the news feed itself, to say nothing of the time it takes if I want to zoom in on a picture or continue reading a particularly long post. Then there’s times when it will time out. Or not show me EVERYTHING I would see if I were checking from my computer and ensuring I was getting most recent statuses first. Or the ads. Dear God, the ads….

I also realized that, for the most part, I check my iPhone FB app when I’m bored. Usually, there ARE other things to do, so not letting myself check the app during the day forces me to do something else, and hopefully more productive with my time.

Of course, none of this even remotely touches on the fact that I’ve grown super-weary of Facebook. I’m tired of the constant political messages, even from viewpoints I agree with. I’m tired of people who feel the need to post 20-30 times a day. I’m tired of the inspirational pictures and messages that some of my friends put up daily. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure people are tired of the stuff that I post too. Somewhere out there, someone following my Facebook feed has threatened to throw their computer/phone at the wall if I post just one more picture of Tard, the Grumpy Cat. And that’s fine. We all have our limits on Facebook.

I’m just setting mine lower. I’ve tweaked my settings and set most people to “important updates only” because otherwise, I’m bombarded, and I can’t enjoy what I’m getting. That alone has reduced the number of feeds I have to catch up on when I do decide to check Facebook on my home computer.

I’m day two into the mission, and so far, so good. However: if you follow me on Facebook and you’re wondering why there’s an extreme drop in my comments or likes to your post, that’s why: I’m not checking as often as I used to, and I’m really, really burnt out on the whole thing, so I’ve reduced the number of posts I’m reading. It’s not you, it’s me. Actually, it’s Facebook itself. Let’s put the blame where it REALLY matters….