After you finish reading this post, step away from the laptop.
In the last few months, one thing's become clear: We are wasting too much time 'surfing the social web' when we should be working, building and executing. It's not much different than 1998-2000, when we couldn't get enough of search and email. But worse. Now we think it's connected to our job, or even worse, a god-given replacement for the smoke break at work. And the amount of niche and user-created content makes for a bottomless pool of information for us to drown in.
Think about it: You go online to check a stock or look up a site. You get distracted by a headline, go down that foxhole, and before you know it you are on your Facebook page, posting comments and clicking around. Then, realizing you might have just lost a half hour, you bounce over to email - and now there are ten from Facebook, along with multiple others that ask you to "click here" (work and/or spam). Before you know it, most of the morning non-meeting gap (only 60 minutes) is g-o-n-e. Now you'll have to answer your emails tonight or super early manana.
Does this sound familiar? You can't really manage time, but you can budget it and stay on plan. This is what you'll have to do if you want to take your life back. Look at it this way: Social surfing takes MUCH more of your time than smoke breaks. When's the last time a smoker hit the porch, and wolfed down a pack (taking about an hour)? When you add up blogs/portals/gossip/social media and shopping site time spent, I'd venture that you're surfing online up to half of your day!
This is going to be hard, because you've built up the addiction over the years, and social media's like digital-crack: much more addicting, with a high that needs to constantly be refreshed. Here's my action plan for you, try this starting TODAY!
1. Give yourself two or four 30 minute (Web Usage) periods per day to start. That's alot, I know, but you'll also use this time to sift through emails that require web use as well as any searches you need to do for work-related research. Put these blocks in your calendar and stick to them.
2. Don't make up excuses to go online outside of your four sessions. Don't let an email bait you. Don't think you can just check one price or score and stop. You must go cold turkey.
3. Organize what you'll do in your 30 minutes for the first 2 minutes of every session. This way, you can prioritize things, and that'll eliminate the need to break the plan.
4. Observe some other internet-addict for inspiration. Watch him/her waste time, floating around aimlessly from Yahoo to TMZ to Facebook to whatever-doesn't-relate-to work. Watch how listless they seem, and how low their energy is. Listen to the mindless chatter they spew in the lunchroom, mostly gossip and useless news-of-the-day. Do you really want to be 'that guy'?
5. When working on email, click File/Work Offline so you are in send mode, this will keep you focused on answering emails and eliminate click-here temptations. Eventually, make the four 30 minute sessions include ALL online time, including email. Read about the low-information diet plan in The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.
6. If you fall off the horse and cheat, don't give up on the plan. This is like quitting anything, you're doing great to be on the plan, don't beat yourself up because quitting is hard. Let everyone you know that you are on this plan, especially if they are tempting you to go online out-of-schedule. If you have to, get a friend or even better a manager to help you. You just may beat this!
In his book Mojo, Marshall Goldsmith suggests that many of us waste time online at work, and don't get much satisfaction or performance from the activity. He's right. In fact, by surfing as we work, we enter into the most unproductive creative state: Multi-tasking. It creates constant decision shift, directly leads to depressionand saps your focus for the next meeting, call or client interaction. If you know someone who needs to read this note, please send it to them with the following message: Time is gold and the world wants to steal it from you - with an offer of edutainment.
Recent Comments