Sometimes my friends ask this. I tell them "I can, but I probably won't."

The tech industry is an enlightened industry. Generally, employees are treated like adults and allowed to organize their days in a way that's productive for them. I usually wake up without an alarm, around 8:30 or 9, and I watch Liverpool games at the office if they're playing during the week. So if you ask me if I have to work tomorrow, the answer is No, I can take off work whenever I want. Another company that does this is Netflix, who lets its employees take as much vacation time as they want.

There's a flip side to this, of course, the reason that I usually show up for work instead of lounging around home in my PJ's watching Friday Night Lights. If I took enough days off work, eventually I'd develop a reputation as someone who didn't ship code. And maybe if someone else in the company wanted work done right, they'd turn to someone else instead. That's not a reputation that I want attached to my name.

It's not all stick, however. I also like showing up for work, making Twilio better and building an experience our users will be delighted with. And part of the reason I like it so much is because our company makes it a lot of fun.

So yes I watch soccer at work and have a beer at the end of the day and go on vacation a lot. But I also put in a lot of work; one day last week I showed up at ten, went home at seven and kept working until one. So I can take off work tomorrow if I want, but I probably won't.

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I've fought with Facebook for a long time. But I've quit for good now. Here are some reasons why I'm happy I don't have one:

• I don't have to worry about embarrassing photos later becoming public. I also don't have to worry about accidentally setting the wrong privacy settings or sharing things with the world that I probably shouldn't.

• I don't have to worry about Facebook selling my browser history. A short detour for the non-technical audience:

  • When you type in your username and password on a site, the site stores a small file on your computer, known as a cookie. 99% of sites on the Internet do this.
  • Then each time you load a new page on a site, your computer sends the cookie to the website as proof that you are you. This way you don't have to enter in your username and password every time you load a new page.

  Now here's what happens when you are logged in to Facebook, and you visit a page with a Like button:

  • Your computer requests the "Like" button content from Facebook. This means that your computer is sending your Facebook cookie to the Facebook servers.

  • Facebook reads your data from the cookie, and makes an entry in its database with your name, the time and the page you visited. It pulls up a list of your friends that have "Liked" the same page.

  • Over time, they can use this information to establish a comprehensive history of your browsing habits.

  Before, I used to only open Facebook in a single-site browser called Fluid, so it wouldn't be able to tie my browsing history to my account (I do the same for Google as well). As it turns out this isn't good enough; they log your IP address when you request a Like button and use it to build a profile of your activity. It's for this reason that facebook.com and www.facebook.com are blocked in my /etc/hosts file.

• I have ten extra minutes every day.

• I won't ever remark out loud about someone's funny status or comment. When you don't have an online social network, these comments sound inane.

• I can avoid zeroes more effectively. I noticed that my Facebook social graph bore little resemblance to my real life social graph; even though I was Facebook friends with my real life friends, we barely interacted on the site. Instead I got a steady stream of updates from people I cared little about. Furthermore, most of the people who added me as a friend were people that I didn't want to hang out with.

  I tried to mitigate this by imposing a strict 150-friend limit. But people would get pissed off that I wouldn't accept their friend request. Because I wasn't interacting with my friends very much on Facebook to begin with, my social life hasn't suffered in its absence.

• I don't get jealous any more. The number one reason guys have a Facebook is to look at pictures of girls. But every time I looked at pictures of girls I met I would get reminded of how much time I wasn't spending with them. I'd assume the worst in every scenario and talk myself out of pursuing people that were interested in me. In this case being oblivious is actually a benefit.

  The photos people post on Facebook are unrealistic versions of their real lives. As an example, here are my last four Facebook photo albums:

  • Me in South Africa
  • Me in India
  • Me in Scotland
  • Me in China

  Generally you don't see albums titled "The night I was too anxious about social interaction to get off my couch" or "The night Ted got so blasted he peed in someone's laundry, then cheated on his girlfriend". This means that unless you're really careful you are going to wonder why your life is so messed up when everyone else is doing great.

• When you want to share a message with someone you could send them a private message. When you post on their Wall, it's no longer a message for that person - it's a signal to everyone else. To me, this is insincere and I always felt posts to my Wall were a little fake. By canceling my account I'm telling people about the signals I'd rather send and receive - private messages from the sender to the recipient.

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There's a pretty short list of things that I like doing: learning new tricks, reading, hanging out with friends, and making beautiful things. On top of that, I've been trying lately to actually follow through on everything I say I am going to do, a sort of five nines for my personal life, that's extraordinarily difficult to stay on top of. I work pretty hard to keep everything else out of the way. Here are a few of the tricks I use to avoid things that I don't want to do.

• Depositing checks: I mail my checks directly to Ally Bank. Total time: about two minutes, plus the cost of a stamp. This is way cheaper than driving to a bank and waiting in line.

• Finding my bank's ATM: I can go to any ATM and Ally Bank will reimburse me for the fees at the end of the month. This is especially handy in Vegas :).

• Waiting on hold with customer service: The ideal solution is to use products that don't require customer service, but for those that do I use LucyPhone. Then I can hang up the call, and they'll dial me when someone's on the line. I use GetHuman to try and get to a human being as fast as possible.

• Finding answers to my random questions: The StackExchange series of sites are wonderful. Most of the time my question already has an answer, but when it doesn't I can usually get one, as long as I take time to ask the question in a coherent way. Failing that, I use Quora, but my results there have been mixed.

• Keeping my devices charged: I keep chargers everywhere - in the car, at work, at home, in my laptop bag. I never have to think about remembering to bring my charger, because I always have one. Same goes with monitor adapters and toiletries.

• Finding new music: I have two really good friends that find good music and mooch off of them. I mostly download remixes from Youtube; they aren't listed in Spotify or iTunes or anywhere. If there was a good easy solution to buy I would consider it. When I'm out I use Shazam to get song names.

• Focusing on the people around me, when I'm on the town: I have a $10 phone I got from Ebay, and another one in my drawer in case it breaks. You may recognize it - a lot of people tell me it was the first cell phone they ever had. I like it because I know how to use it, and it doesn't come loaded with a whole bunch of Verizon junk. I buy minutes from Page Plus; I get 1,000 minutes for $50 and this lasts me about three months.

  I also have an iPod Touch that I use as a smartphone when I'm on a wireless network, which practically speaking is every place that's not a bar or a club.

• Figuring out what I'm going to do on the weekend: My friends are great planners, so I usually go out with them. I'm lucky too that I have different groups of friends from middle school, high school, college and work, so I can choose what I'm going to do on a given night.

• Commuting: My commute is 25 minutes door-to-door, which is about as short as it's going to get on public transit in SF. Driving in the city is extraordinarily stressful, so I don't do it. The public transit is generally great.

• Finding information when I'm out, making restaurant reservations, other assorted tasks: I call Visa Concierge for things that are synchronous, like finding nearby restaurants, movie times or bus routes. I use Timesvr to automate some of the tedious things that have to get done.

• Doing laundry: I don't really have a good solution for this yet, but I'd gladly pay to avoid having to drag clothes to a laundromat. I keep about a month's worth of underwear, undershirts and socks.

• Buying clothes: As a rule of thumb, I don't.

• Window management, and other repetitive computer tasks: I gladly pay for software and hardware that saves me time. Examples: Divvy, Witch, Skitch, TextExpander, 1Password, external monitors, and Peepcode tutorials.

A lot of this stuff is somewhat expensive; I'm lucky I have a job where I can afford to offload a lot of this stuff.

I would pay even more if good solutions existed for other problems in my life. I need to find a new dentist, and someone to get my eyes checked, but don't want to spend time finding someone good. I'd also like someone to manage some finance, healthcare, and server administration things - submit expense reports, transfer money between bank accounts according to certain rules, move all my domains to the same host and domain registrar, but it's hard finding someone I trust to do that at a reasonable price.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.