Do you find yourself wandering off into the realms of social networking sites like Facebook when you know you should be spending time on business matters? While there is nothing wrong with Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Plaxo it is very easy to let those sites absorb hours that could be better spent on office routines.
As Peter Drucker once pointed out, no good business result ever happens by accident. The internet, in its negative aspect, provides a way to distract or interrupt yourself throughout the day. It’s easy to blame others for interruptions that impede our progress and sabotage our plans, but the reality is that we interrupt ourselves frequently. We would prefer to be chatting rather than handling a major project or filing completed work.
When you are working in an organized office (and you can see the difference in these photos), you prioritize your work and get more done each day. Then there’s time to catch up with Facebook and other groups. You can include that in your daily schedule, but before you go online, set a specific amount of time that you can devote to the social networking scene and stick to that. Use a timer if you find yourself frequently scrolling past your personal deadline.
One time management strategy I use to manage these social networking sites is to have a separate email address. All related correspondence goes to that inbox. I do not see incoming mail during the day when I need to concentrate on priority work. At the end of a day, I then might take a quick look to see if there is something which I’d like to review or address. Doing this follows the principle of grouping your activities. You are four times more productive when you focus on one type of activity at a time rather than bouncing from one thing to another and back again.
0 responses so far ↓
1 Carey Giudici // Jan 20, 2009 at 10:12 am
Hi Denise, I love your blogs, and in this one you offer good advice about not getting sidetracked by social media sites. I’ve gotten disillusioned about them in general, and have decided that
they offer less meaningful human interaction than my filing cabinet!
Most people spending time on Facebook and similar sites seem almost exclusively interested in telling the rest of us more than we need to know about their business, personality, or relative importance in the world.
And how does getting irrelevant information about so many strangers keep me connected? It doesn’t, really. It makes me feel overwhelmed with TMI–too much information.
Thanks but no thanks. To connect with people whom I know have some interest in me, and to find information that’s actually pertinent and useful, I prefer to visit . . . my filing cabinet or address book.
There’s a surprising amount of human interaction going on in my files; all the correspondence, forms and queries tell great stories if you know how to read them. And my cabinets don’t try to decide what I should consider important, how long a document should be saved, or what that information might mean to my future success. The data in my files and notes describe exactly what I need to do, instead of who wants to be a “friend,” or how many of those people I can manage to add to my list.
Social media sites give off more heat than light. There are more productive ways to communicate what really matters to you and your “offline” community. You can start by getting a little more “friendly” with your filing system.