Matt Baril

While I was in the library, looking for a good book on time management (how ironic) I came across Julien Smith‘s blog post about Social Media and reliability/productivity. Julien claims that "there seems to be a correlation between amount of time spent on social media and ability to get work done." and I couldn’t agree more with him. At least it’s true for. I spend so much time reading, replying and creating content that I have no time left to do anything else than the absolute necessary.

I’ve become a News addict and Apple has facilitated this. I installed apps on my iPod Touch and I read NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Globe and Mail (Canadian newspaper), Huffington Post, AP, Business Week, Cyberpresse (French Canadian Newspaper). Once I’m done with the traditional newspaper, I fire Regator, an excellent app which offers "a directory of the web’s best blog posts hand picked", and spend some more time reading and I pay a particular attention to "What’s Hot", an option that works like Twitter trending topics. I then log in to my Twitter account and start reading all the tweets I’ve received and the articles some tweets lead to. Only then, I can start breathing, I know what’s going on in the world, but I’m not done, I need to know about what really interests me now! So I Iog to my gmail and reply to all the emails that were sent to the 6 email addresses that gmail manages for me. Once I’ve replied to everyone, it’s time to see what TweetBeep and Google Alert have for me. I track what’s been published on my  favourite topics and I also make sure I know if anyone has talked about me on the web! Now that I know what’s going on in the world and I’m up-to-date with topics that really interest me, I can happily log in to Facebook and update my profile and share links of articles I just read. I’ll obviously take time to reply to my friends and make sure I wish happy birthday to people who it is their birthday and send a couple of message to people I haven’t talked to for a while. Now I need to do one last thing before I can start my day, log in to hotmail and mainly delete my spam, but also to look if I got messages, just in case someone hasn’t notices I’ve been using gmail for 5 years now.

Of course, this kind of life is a non sense, but when you want to be in the loop that’s not the feeling you’ve got, until you’re totally exhausted and you realized you haven’t got a lot done lately. People who use social media for professional purposes are trying to convince themselves that this will actually help them build a brand of themselves and hopefully get a better job. They’re thinking that in order to look professional, they have to get more followers on Twitter, they need to get this blog rolling and start generating comments, they need to use LinkedIn more and make more connections as well as contributing more to the discussions there. They’ve got to be careful to what they post on Facebook and the words they choose because employers do look on Facebook before hiring a candidate. If people use social media for personal use, then they worry about what people will think or say. How long since the last time they updated their status? Have they replied to that girl from high school who sent them a message almost… damn! a week ago, it’s been almost a week and they haven’t replied yet! What is she gonna say? After all, they haven’t talked for 10 years… what if she has to wait an extra week? Did Marc uploaded the pictures from last night yet? He said he would, he’d better do it soon. It’s always more, more and more. Social media, or addiction to social media (it’s a fine line sometimes) creates anxiety. If you don’t believe me, try to do like Robert Doede, a philosophy professor, he suggests to his students to stop using social media for 4 months. That includes: Facebook (obviously), Twitter, youtube, myspace, blogs, msn, and the likes. Are you shivering just at the thought of it? I am! As Mr. Doede says, social media is creating anxiety, anxiety of not being in the know, not being up-to-date, not being able to update your status to let the "world" know what you’re doing at this very moment.

So now here I am, with a social media addiction, and I’m not quite sure how I’m gonna deal with this yet. One thing I know is I can’t keep spending 4 hours a day on social media, because I’m just not effective anymore and I’m sacrificing other part of my life for social media. I’m thinking I could make a list of what I want to accomplish with social media, then develop a strategy and focus on that strategy only. Everything else is a waste of time. I’ll use tools depending of what my priorities are: eg. Twitter for professional use, Facebook for personal use. Then I’ll have to pick a way to limit myself and not spend 4 hours a day on different social media. I’ve thought of 3 ways to do that:

• Limit based on the time I spend daily on Social Media. That’s probably the easiest way to manage it, but the high quality content is not published equally, meaning that I might run out of time some days while other I’ll have way too much time.
• Limit based on the websites I use. I could cut everything that I think is not contributing to my top priorities. Cutting out blogs that are not that relevant to my RSS feed would be a good example of this. But obviously, cutting sources of information isn’t the best way to ensure getting the best content online.
• Limit based on where I am. For example, the bus and the fitness centre are great places to catch up on Social Media. Home and work, not so much. That is attractive because I can make sure I don’t neglect my family, friends and work while still being “in the loop”.

Life needs to be productive and satisfying. Social media can help accomplish this, but learning how to use it properly and more importantly, being more disciplined by keeping track of my priorities are keys. I bet there are many people in the same situation, people who love social media, but are struggling with the time management part. How are you guys coping? What are your secrets for using social media while not going over the top?