38 Things You Could Do With the Time You Spend on Facebook

Nielsen reported this week that Facebook is now officially the web’s biggest time suck (or time sink, if you prefer), with the average American user clocking in at over seven hours of Facebook use per month – which doesn’t sound all that shocking compared to how much TV the average American watches: 153 hours per month, and that’s just at home, not counting sports bars, the Internet and so on. Holy crap, people, turn off the TV – you’re probably missing something on Facebook!

Nonetheless, it’s a lot compared to other online activities – seven hours per month is more time than we spend on Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Amazon and Wikipedia combined. (Holy crap, people, turn off Facebook, you might be missing something on YouTube!)

Occasionally we all make bad choices when it comes to how we spend our time. So I present to you a list of 38 alternative activities you could do in the time you spend on Facebook.

1. Get an extra night’s worth of sleep
2. Write an extra week’s worth of blog posts (or guest posts)
3. Attend a one-day conference, seven webinars or 14 product demos
4. Take a seven-week class (dance lessons? Learn PHP?)
5. Respond to 84 unanswered emails (five minutes per email)
6. Make your own lunch to bring to work every day
7. Apply to three grants or 14 jobs
8. Buy an external hard drive and back up all your files
9. Read to your kid for 15 minutes a day (or watch half an episode of Sesame Street with them)
10. Write in a journal for 15 minutes a day
11. Add a chapter to your novel
12. Run a marathon (or three)
13. Bike 70 miles
14. Ski 420 miles (if you’re Lindsay Vonn)
15. Do the Denise Austin: Boot Camp Total Body Blast! workout eight times
16. Climb Mount Whitney
17. Hike down the Grand Canyon
18. Get seven massages
19. Meditate for 20 minutes four times per week
20. Floss 200 times (6 times per day!)
21. Clean out your closets/basement/attic; donate your rejects
22. Go to the dentist, see your doctor, wash your car, get a tune-up and rotate your tires, flip your mattress, pay all your bills on time, and send someone flowers (it’s probably their birthday)
23. Paint a room
24. Read a 400-page book (averaging a minute or so per page)
25. See a play, a concert and an opera
26. Watch the entire Cremaster Cycle, with time for a couple of bathroom breaks
27. Process three drinks
28. Watch 140 YouTube videos
29. Read 168 Wikipedia “articles”
30. Drive from Boston to Washington, DC, or Paris to Munich (no bathroom breaks, sorry)
31. Fly from New York to LA or London
32. Cook two 12-pound stuffed turkeys in a row
33. Make your own yogurt
34. Make a batch of Jell-O shots
35. Play two rounds of golf, one game of Risk, three games of Monopoly, or nine games of Clue
36. Beat Halo 3, KillZone 2, Secret of Monkey Island, Sonic & the Secret Rings, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, or Wolfenstein
37. Solve 2,530 Rubik’s cubes (assuming you’re really good at this)
38. Volunteer

And if you’d really rather spend your time on Facebook, consider becoming a fan of WordStream? 🙂

Have a great weekend!