Around 10pm last night, I “cleared out” my Reader, and picked a stopping point in Facebook and Friendfeed, so I could start fresh tonight (Monday) and see just how much would accumulate in 24 hours… and how long it’d take me to get through it.
So here are my numbers:
- Facebook: Browsing (and commenting a bit) on a filtered newsfeed of one group of 270 friends: 20 minutes
- Friendfeed: Browsing (and commenting/liking a bit) on a selected group comprised of about 80 friends: 8 minutes
- Twitter: Browsed through unfiltered/ungrouped list via Brizzly (happy to offer invites to the first ten people who contact me): 12 minutes.
- Reader: Browsing through my ??? feeds (and checking out a few original pages + adding a couple comments): 28 minutes (”???” because Reader never was able to load up anything when I clicked on “Manage my subscriptions.” Bummer! But I’m guessing I have over 200 feeds, of which probably 100 are updated at least weekly)
- This is more than an hour every single day, including weekends, holidays, vacation times, etc.
- Worse yet (and more importantly), this does not include my personal e-mail, which I estimate would take me about an hour daily in and of itself to read and appropriately reply to messages.
- Nor does this include Wave. Or Techmeme. Or online News. Or really anything else in the vast online world.
- It certainly doesn’t include the time I should be spending composing thoughtful e-mails to my Grandpa, to my friends near and far, and so on. 500 or so contacts in my addressbook… people that I care about. If I e-mailed each one just once a month, that’s more than one substantive e-mail every day (in addition to the other replies).
- And it certainly doesn’t include corporate (work) mail and related stuff, but that’s well beyond the scope of this inquiry, in which I’m trying to pin down this...
* * *
Well, now you know, or at least have an idea about my time allocations.
Where does your time go?
- How much time do you spend each day on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? (Not sure? Try what I did, and actually time it!)
- Is that more than you thought? Less than you thought? Does it make sense for you?
Curious to hear your numbers and your feelings on this…
[Edited at 1:18am October 13 to add: Twitter stats]



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