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For years now, my usual morning routine has gone roughly like this:

1. Wake up.
2. Turn on my iPad mini.
3. Look at Google News, and read any articles that look interesting. Post some of them to Facebook and Twitter.
4. Read whichever of my regular webcomics have posted that day.
5. Read Facebook, responding to posts as I go, and reposting some linked-to articles on Facebook and Twitter.
6. Get out of bed.
7. Have breakfast, shave, shower, get dressed, start my day.

I like this approach and find it generally interesting and informative and enjoyable. But there are a couple of problems with it, such as:

• It sometimes takes several hours, which means I get a late start on my day.
• I don’t get anything else done in the mornings.

Partly as a result of that, I often don’t get around to starting my daily repeating tasks (like Duolingo and labeling photos) until late at night, when I’m half asleep. Often, I don’t get around to those tasks at all.

I was talking with Mary Anne recently, and she talked about doing items from her task list first thing after waking up. And I thought, huh, maybe I should try that.

I’m not a morning person. It takes me a long time to get up to speed after waking up, and I generally work better in afternoons and evenings. But there are some relatively low-braining-requirement tasks that I can do shortly after waking up, like reading (some kinds of) fiction, or labeling photos.

I tried it the other morning, and got some useful work done first thing. But then I tried to do my usual routine after that, which meant I got an even later start on my day than usual.

All of which is leading me to the conclusion that yet again, my Facebook habits have reached the point where I’m spending more time there than I’m comfortable with.

So I’m gonna take a break from Facebook for a while. That’s complicated by the fact that I have dozens of open tabs waiting to be posted there, and the fact that I have a couple of regular weekly features that I post (old family photos and pictures of my stuffed animals) that I’m not willing to give up on. So I might do some posting even if I’m not reading other people’s posts, and that probably means I’ll read comments on my posts, and I doubt I’ll manage to entirely stop myself from reading other people’s posts. So “break” may be overstating things. But at least I’ll try to reduce my levels of engagement there.

I should make clear that I really like Facebook in many ways. It’s a great source of news and information for me, and I love being able to engage with far-flung friends in a lightweight way, seeing what people are up to and responding with a quick click of a button. But if I let it, it will take up all of my time, and there’s too much else I want to get done.