I Left Facebook. My Work Didn't.

Leaving Facebook created a problem I didn't really think about until I started solving it. I wanted to be done with the part where I personally opened Facebook, scrolled through it, checked notifications, got distracted by whatever people were arguing about, and somehow looked up twenty minutes later wondering why I was still there. At the same time, I still have things I care about that depend on Facebook to reach people. There are events to share, organizations and people I want to support, community information worth putting in front of people, and pages that can't simply disappear because I decided I was done with the platform personally.

For a while those two things seemed connected whether I liked it or not. If I wanted to keep supporting everything I was involved with, somebody had to make the posts, and a lot of the time that somebody was me. That meant opening Facebook to do something useful and being dropped directly into everything I was trying to get away from. Even when I was disciplined enough to post something and leave, I still had to remember that it needed posted in the first place.

I've now automated Facebook for all of my pages, and it has been a fucking life changer. The pages can continue doing what they're supposed to do without requiring me to physically sit there every day and push everything through myself. Information can go out, events can continue getting promoted, people can continue being supported, and the work doesn't stop just because I stopped logging into Facebook. I removed myself from the repetitive part without removing the benefit other people were getting from it.

I think that's the part of automation that interests me more than simply saving time. Everybody talks about automation like the goal is doing less work, and obviously that's part of it, but I'm starting to see it more as separating the work that actually requires me from the work that merely requires somebody to remember to do it. Writing something thoughtful requires me. Deciding what I care about requires me. Talking to somebody, coming up with an idea, solving a new problem, or figuring out what should happen next requires me. Copying information into the same place at the same time every day does not.

There is a ridiculous amount of life hidden inside those repetitive little jobs. Five minutes doesn't sound like anything until something takes five minutes every day across several pages, several projects, and several years. Then add the mental part of remembering all of it, checking whether it happened, realizing you forgot something, stopping whatever you're doing to fix it, and getting pulled into another platform along the way. The actual click might take thirty seconds while the interruption takes ten minutes out of your brain.

Facebook was especially strange for me because I had already decided I didn't want the social part of social media anymore. I didn't want the audience scoreboard, the constant reactions, the feed, or the feeling that I needed to know what everybody was saying all the time. I built this archive partly because I still wanted somewhere to put thoughts into the world without turning every thought into a little public referendum. Automating the pages feels like finishing another piece of that separation.

I'm not disappearing from the things I care about. If anything, this lets me keep supporting more of them without paying for it with as much of my attention. Somebody can have an event tomorrow and still benefit from something I built to help people find it, even if I never open Facebook tomorrow. Something useful can happen at 8:00 in the morning while I'm drinking coffee, working, getting kids ready, or doing absolutely nothing related to social media.

There is also something satisfying about building a system once and watching it continue doing useful work. I've always had the problem of seeing something that needs to happen repeatedly and eventually getting annoyed that a human being is still doing it repeatedly. Sometimes the answer really is that a person needs to do the work, because judgment and relationships don't automate very well. Other times we're just spending pieces of our lives performing the same mechanical steps because nobody stopped long enough to remove them.

I'm trying to get better at noticing the difference. I don't want technology replacing the parts of my life that are worth actually experiencing, and I definitely don't want to automate my way out of relationships or community. I want it taking the bullshit surrounding those things off my plate so I have more capacity for the parts that require an actual person. If a machine can handle the repetitive distribution while I spend that time building something, helping somebody, being with my family, or just getting my brain away from another screen, that's a pretty good trade.

The funny part is that quitting Facebook didn't make me stop using Facebook as a tool. It made me finally separate the tool from the experience Facebook wanted me to have while using it. My pages can exist there, information can move through them, and people can still receive something useful without me needing to stand inside the machine pulling the lever every day. I can continually support people without continually performing the manual labor that used to come with supporting them.

A few years ago, I probably would have thought the only choices were staying on Facebook and doing all of this myself or leaving and letting everything stop. It turns out there was a third option sitting between them. I could leave while the work stayed behind and kept working. That's probably one of the clearest examples I've found yet of what I actually want technology to do for me: give me pieces of my life back without requiring me to stop doing the things I care about.