http://www.socmedsean.com/can-social-media-disrupt-your- life-or-career-5- tips- for-managing- the- timesink/ Februray 3, 2013

Can Social Media Disrupt Your Life Or Career? 5 Tips ForManaging The Timesink

Social media offers a lot of great opportunit ies and access to information. Amongother things, some of the benefits of engaging in the social space include:

The chance to stay connected with friends or family who don’t live close

A way to meet new people and build relat ionships

Access to fun, entertaining content that just makes you laugh

Access to educational content that helps you grow your career or expandyour understanding of a topic

The opportunity for companies to connect, on a personal basis, with yourcustomers

Opportunit ies for authors to access a broad audience that you can sharehelpful, useful information with

The chance to write and share content in a way that posit ions you as athought leader in your niche

The challenge, however, is that social media can also distract you from what isimportant in life. If not kept in check, writ ing art icles, playing online games andsurf ing blogs, tweets, posts and photos can easily suck away hours from yourday. These act ivit ies may actually cause damage by keeping you from meetingyour work deadlines or distract ing your from your real-life relat ionships. At theextreme, it might even end up in a lost job or a failed relat ionship.

Personally, I have experienced nights where I start surf ing (or playing) at 10PMand look up at the clock to f ind that it ’s 2AM, wondering where the t ime went.Here are a few steps I took to keep from spending too much t ime with my digitalrelat ionships and not enough t ime in real life:

1. Schedule your time…and stick to it – I consistent ly spend 1 hour inthe morning and 2 hours at night to work in the social space. Since I workin social media in my day job, I pop in and out of my social channelsduring the day, but commit to not spending more than 10 minutes at at ime.

2. Set a timer – Along with #1, be sure to set a t imer that beeps at youwhen t ime’s up. When the t imer beeps, f inish your tweet or post andthen move back to real-life relat ionships and object ives.

3. Don’t Tweet and Eat- Meals are a great t ime for real-life relat ionshipbuilding. Put the gadgets down and stop checking your social channelsand email.

4. Sometimes…it’s just better to sign off – Your real-life relat ionshipsare a LOT more important than your digital ones (sorry tweeps).Sometimes it ’s just a good idea to take a break, spend t ime with yourclose friends, and give you family plenty of t ime and hugs.

5. Worker Smarter- Rather than spending your t ime surf ing sites orreading tweets, have the content your really care about delivered to youusing RSS feeds or through targeted Twitter lists. Here are a few greatart icles that can help you with that:

Finding Content For Your Blog With Google Reader

Creating the Perfect Twitter Lists

The Smart Worker’s Guide to Social Media

The other thing you might want to consider is doing an assessment of where yourt ime is going. For a day or two, write down the amount of t ime you are spendingonline. Is it going to answering email? Are you spending too much t ime tweeting?Maybe Facebook updates are consuming your day. Once you understand, youcan adjust the t ime spent. Just for fun, you might check out this interest inginfographic from the f ine folks at At lassian that shows where many of are wastingour t ime at work:

Have you have experienced the “social mediat imewarp” of lost t ime? I’d love to hear other t ips,tricks and resources that helped you manage t imeeffect ively in the digital world. Have you writ ten ablog post on managing t ime effect ively? I’d loveto see a link in the comments.

Cheers!

–Sean