time management
Managing Social Media Burnout
A reporter from CTV News came to Magnify Digital today to ask what advice we could offer to people with social media burnout. Turns out, managing time spent on these all-consuming networks is a popular new year’s resolution. You can see why it would be. The problem is there’s no on/off switch for social media. It’s always on. And we have more and more ways to connect to it. Through our computers, our phones, other handheld devices. Never before has social media been so prevalent and accessible.
Here are some tips on how you can reclaim some of your personal time:
- Limit the amount of time you spend on social networks. Even go as far as setting timers, to remind you when to step away.
- If you’re spreading yourself too thin trying to maintain multiple profiles across several networks, ditch one or two. Focus on fewer channels; maybe even just one.
- Consider dropping a friend or acqaintence if they’re too chatty and constantly require too much of your social time online. If that feels too harsh, then resist always giving him/her a response. You’ll train them to stop expecting it… and hopefully, asking for it too.
- On Facebook, turn off your chat function. That way, if you’ve limited yourself to ten minutes on Facebook, you won’t get caught using 8 of those 10 minutes on a chat. To find this function, look to the bottom right of your personal profile page. If the circle beside chat is green, you’re open for business. Simply click on this to open the chat function, select ‘options’ and ‘go offline’.
- If having a daily presence on social networks is important to you, use tools that can post your content for you. You can pre-schedule messages using tools like Hootsuite to populate your Twitter profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many others.
- Likewise, Ping.fm & Friendfeed are two examples of tools that give you the “one-stop-shop” option. If you want to post a message to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace all at the same time – these tools will do that for you.
- Even location-based tools like Foursquare and Gowalla can be managed simultaneously. Gowalla recently integrated Foursquare, Tumblr, and Facebook into its platform.
- If you’re feeling burnt out from too many messages on Twitter – also referred to as a congested stream – free tools like Tweetdeck allow you to organize who you’re following into columns (like friend tweets only, tech tweets, foodie tweets, etc.). That way, you can limit how much you see without having to drop friends or people you like to follow.
- And finally, this post would not be complete without mentioning mobile apps! These little gems can be a friend or foe when it comes to helping manage burnout. Apps can simplify access to social media – but perhaps too much. Limit your use of applications just as you would the social networks they’re enabling.
What do you do to manage a threat of burnout online?
Erin
Tags: Apps, burnout, chat, Erin, facebook, foursquare, friendfeed, gowalla, HootSuite, LinkedIn, ping.fm, time management, Tumblr, tweetdeck, Twitter
Get Things Done VS Twitter
I’ve been thinking about the subject of this post for a while because, well, I’m almost “addicted” to Twitter. It is getting more and more mainstream every day, more people are starting to tweet and more content is made available every second. This is definitely great; however, it could become overwhelming – especially if you follow more than 200 talkative Twitterers (which was my case not so long ago…).
The big question: How can you manage your time while utilizing Twitter?
Twitter gets updated all the time. It is very difficult to resist checking it when you know something is there, waiting to be discovered.
Additionally, Twitter is being used as a general chatting application. Because there is no push notification, you “have to” instinctively look at it, making sure you’re not missing any messages from any friends.
The solution: Get Things Done VS Twitter
#1 Filter your list. If you follow someone who has their own blog, you will be better following his blog RSS feed. Unless you are getting some special content from his Twitter account, most of the information will also be published on his blog in a more condensed and informative way.
#2 Be sure your followings are worth your time. Try the following test: for a week, calculate the number of meaningful tweets a following produced. If less than 80% of its content is useful, you should remove it from your list. For example, I was following an excellent SEO professional but I had to dig in his tweets because only 1 out of 5 messages was related to SEO. When I saw “There is a girl in my batcave”, that was it, he was gone.
#3 Time management. Don’t put any Twitter or Twitter feed applications on your homepage (Ex: your iGoogle home page). Define periods of time when you should look at it and stick to these rules. I personally use my lunch break and just before I go to bed.
#4 The new Twitter feature “Twitter list” should be used. Classify your followings into categories such as “Best eMarketing heros”, “must read every day” , “job” or “just for killing time”. During your Twitter periods, browse by priority and stop when the time is up. It’s not really important if you didn’t have enough time to read the latest tweets from your favorite rock star.
eMaketing Strategist
Tags: Get things done, Social Media, time management, Twitter
Coffee Orders by iPhone
There are lots of people spending enormous amounts of time making apps that help us run our lives more efficiently. Like the new app Dunkin’ Run (US only) – which obliterates wasting a half hour walking around the office gathering coffee and tea orders and making chit chat. The idea is, you use the Dunkin’ Run app to send out an alert to your friends. Then they log on to dunkinrun.com and place their coffee orders, which are then sent to your iPhone. So you and the donut shop have record of the order, and no one forgets the double sugar!
Convenient, yes, but what are the possibilities of an app like this? An app that alerts, initiates action, then gathers information, putting you in motion, saving time, avoiding idle chatter. Pretty soon, we’ll have iPhone apps that remind us to pay the bills, go to the dentist, and visit with our mothers. We’ll program our lives through our phone, tossing our paper daytimers out the window. Already you can adjust your household thermostat, pre-heat your oven, start your car, track flight arrivals and spy on your babysitter, all in a matter of minutes. And although it is possible to read bedtime stories to our kids using Skype on our iPhone, is that going too far? What the iPhone will never achieve is that feeling of warmth as you hug your child after a long day. There will never be an app for that.
As for organizing and streamlining our worklives and managing household tasks, iPhone apps are already proving extremely useful.
Mashable has some great lists of iPhone apps here http://mashable.com/category/iphone-lists/
Katy
Tags: app, household, iPhone, time management
