How much time have you wasted on Facebook? New tool has the answer

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how much time you’ve spent scrolling through your news feed, ‘liking’ friends’ status updates or jealously flipping through your old classmates’ vacation albums, wonder no longer: TIME has a way to find out the answer.

TIME Magazine’s Techland blog has developed a nifty little calculator to help you figure out the total time you have spent on Facebook over the period you’ve belonged to the social network. The tool has been posted ahead of the ten year anniversary of TheFacebook.com, as it was first known. That’s right, Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of the site in a Harvard dorm room took place a decade ago.

The tool works like this: You enter in the average number of minutes a day you spend on Facebook, then after authorizing the app to go through your Facebook account, runs through the timestamps of every post you’ve made to Facebook until it reaches the earliest one. It assumes that is your approximate join date, then calculates, if you spent the average number of minutes a day every day on the social network, how long you’ve been on the site for.

[ More Right Click: ‘What Would I Say?’ app generates Facebook statuses for you… sort of ]

Of course, this has one major flaw in getting an exact number: I have no idea how many minutes each day I spend on Facebook, and I doubt many other people do either. I’ll check Facebook absentmindedly while waiting at bus stops and periodically throughout the day on my phone, but I couldn’t tell you how often I do that in a day, or for how long. The TIME calculator says that the average user spends 17 minutes each day on Facebook, but it’s hard to tell if that’s accurate for you.

What is interesting, though, is seeing how long you’ve been a part of Facebook, and how many posts you’ve made in that time. Seeing that I’ve posted nearly 10,000 things to my Facebook feed seems much more telling of just how much time I’ve wasted.

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