Facebook is the biggest productivity limiter currently in my life (short of a Retina Mac Book Pro, which I suppose would actually be a productivity booster.)

If I’m honest with myself, I often revert to Facebook as a default thing to do. I’m not as bad as some people that automatically start typing www.facebo as soon as they open a browser regardless of their intent of opening their browser to start with. My automatic is still starts as goog…

I disabled email notifications a few years ago. That was great! It stopped the flow of hundreds of emails into my inbox about farmville. Today I cleaned up my inbox of over 3000 messages. None of them were facebook notifications. I realised that even without facebook, I have a whole heap of things that I need to get done on a day to day basis.

Back to the facebook dilema. Even without the emails, my iPhone continues to distract me all day.

*buzz* New Event, *buzz* New Like, *buzz* New Comment, *buzz* New Like, *buzz* New Friend, *buzz* New Like.

I looked at these notifications today and thought about what I actually needed to know during the day.

I came to the conclusion that if I really thought about it, I only needed to know about one thing on Facebook during the day, Messages. The reason being is that they’re used to communicate like an SMS. They’re (usually) targeted to you with relevant information.

I can ignore everything else until I get home, without any negative repercussions. 

On Facebook for iPhone, there’s actually an option to disable all these notifications.

Load the sidebar on the right and scroll right down to Account Settings > Notifications. You’ll be presented with a list like the one on the right. Unselect everything you don’t really need to know instantly.

As much as I love to know what’s going on and yes, there’s that good feeling when someone likes one of my photos or posts, In reality, I can wait till later to find out about it!

Today has been a great success implementing this change. I’ve looked at my phone sitting on the desk next to me only for phone calls and text messages whist getting a mountain of work done on the computer.

We live in a world where everyone is always “busy”. I can gurantee that I don’t have close to the number of comitments on the calendar of the Prime Minister or the local Church pastor for that matter. How is it that I still use the term “busy” to define my life.

I’m not busy… I’m just spending way to much time on notifications and other distractions that break up my day.