Spring Clean Your Facebook Friend List

Spring cleaning time is here, and I want you to take a moment and look around. No, not at your house – you can pay someone else to come in and spring clean that bad boy. I’m talking about your friend list on Facebook. It’s a mess, and it’s time you cleaned it up. You’ll thank me later.

When Facebook just got going for me and my friends, we were all happily married (or just getting married) and most of us had babies already (or were just starting to have babies) —  and we all got a little carried away with the accepting-all-sorts-of-friend-requests-we-probably-should-not-have.

Here’s a rough list of people you can probably consider deleting, if their mere presence keeps you from wanting to share things or if you just don’t connect with them.

Old school “friends”. At first, it’s fun to see what some people from high school and college are up to. But if you didn’t stay in touch after school, you probably won’t have a lot in common on Facebook either, so be careful who you accept friend requests from. While we are at it, stop looking up your old boyfriends too. If you must — just peek at their profile picture and move on.

Old co-workers. I must have friended 30 or so people I used to work with. Out of that amount, I say only 10 are considered friends and that I interact with in real life or Facebook. Why am I keeping the others around?

Toxic family members. If they drive you crazy on national holidays, they’ll drive you crazy on Facebook too. Delete them if you felt like you had to request them. If you can’t quite go that far, make sure you don’t include them on your status updates…go to your privacy options to set that up. I do that all the time and no one is the wiser.

People from that boot camp place you went to over three years ago. Yeah…and never went back when the month from hell was over. Delete!

Anyone over-zealous about the upcoming election. Or at the very least – hide them from your news feed! No one can take that from now until November.

How does your list look? Delete, delete, delete.