My month without Facebook - What I learned

A month ago I decided to go without the super monster of Facebook for the month, a bit of an experiment to see what happened and some time to figure out how I feel about this whole social media thing...

So here's what happened

1. Usually people remembered to tell me about important things and still invite me to events. Sometimes they didn't. And that was okay.
All of the really important things I managed to catch and it was actually really nice seeing people remember to talk to me in person or text me about something 

2. After the first two days I forgot about Facebook almost completely. I didn't feel the need to go on all the time and I didn't feel like I was missing out. In fact, come the end of the month I didn't actually really want to go back on it at all, but that will take a bit more figuring out as to the logistics of that.

3. I wrote more letters and called more people. This was something I had planned to do anyway during this month, so it wasn't a surprise, but not having a stalker view on people's lives for the month meant that when I called people or wrote them a letter, I could ask about their life and be genuinely surprised when they told me things rather than saying "Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook".

4. I studied better. Nothing more needs to be said on this one, we all know what it's like.

5. I had time to think about how to use Facebook rather than let Facebook use me. I do have a lot of thoughts on this but I'm not going to write them here, if you want to talk about it then we can do it in person

6. I was surprised by the number of people who after their initial confused reaction were pretty excited and said that they wished they could do something like that... which by the way you can.
I was also surprised by the number of conversations that went something like "Hey, did you see on Facebook that... oh, you don't have Facebook. Sorry." Which in writing doesn't sound funny at all, but it was often said in the same tone of voice that you might use if you started telling a puppy joke to someone then realised their puppy had died the week before.
Weird.

7. I missed a couple of birthdays. That kind of sucked. But then I realised that if I only remember someone's birthday because I see it on Facebook, either that person isn't really that important to me, or I need to be a better friend and write this stuff down somewhere else! Bring back the birthday diary!

So, what happens now?
 I don't really know.
 I am thinking about going off Facebook for good, but I need to sort through stuff before that since a lot of my work, volunteer and study communication happens through Facebook.
But I might not.
I know I'll definitely go on here less. And I won't have Facebook on my phone or tablet because I use those things when I'm with people and it would be much better to use that time to talk to people!