A regular column devoted to developing the skills necessary to survive in the 21st century workplace.
Let’s face it, social media can be distracting, very distracting (if you let it). It has an overwhelming ability to cause inefficiency in productivity – leading to missed deadlines, forgotten tasks, and even worse, forgotten promises. It is certainly the main reason 54% of companies ban Facebook and Twitter at work.
However, at the same time, each day we are learning and experiencing tremendous benefits from getting engaged in social media activities and becoming social businesses. Here are three tips to keep you focused and help you stay ahead.
1. Discipline, Discipline, Discipline
Create planned times in your daily routine to conduct your social media activities and stick to it. Block it out. Do nothing else during that time. If possible, that includes not answering the phone.
2. Create Targets For Each Week And Use A Scorecard To Track Them
Before you can effectively do number one, you first need to set your objectives. I’ll share mine as an example. Each week I have a plan to complete the below activities and time scheduled Sunday night to complete my scorecard.
- 2 LinkedIn Anwsers
- 5 Blog Comments On Other Blogs
- 2 posts per week here (Minimum)
- 2 Business Week Exchange Article Submissions
- 3 Facebook Posts
- 3 LinkedIn posts
- 35 Tweets through @b2bbloggers
You’ll notice I have specific targets for each activity. Having achievable targets is vital to managing personal productivity because it lets you know when to stop one task and move to another.
3. Do One Activity At A Time
Listed above are seven independent activities that are all social media activities. Personally, one of the things I have noticed that causes me to become inefficient is mixing the activities. I’ll be in the middle of writing a post and the next thing I realize, I am commenting on a post I read for research. That’s not disciplined – that’s wandering.
Now, of course, there are instances that it makes sense to mix the activities. The point is – be careful not to get lost in an endless amount of clicks and links…and look back after 30 minutes has gone by and have nothing accomplished.
That’s it. Till next time, tell me some of your tips for keeping focused and increasing social media productivity. Let’s help each other be more productive.
