“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” - Steve Jobs
Face it: in the digital age, your time is one of your most precious commodities. Never in the known history of the world has a culture needed to perceive, process, and act on information to the extent each and every one of us must today.
Unfortunately for us, though, the same tools that bring human beings together over generations, cultures, and continents—social networking and social media sites—can devour hours and hours of our limited spare time. As our involvement in different services and sites gets more involved and complex, it’s easy to spend exponentially more energy online if our habits go unchecked.
How do we simplify our social network existences and ably manage our valuable time? I’ve compiled a list of some great practical, philosophical, and experimental resources on how to be more efficient, smarter, and effective when working with social media and social networking:
General simplification
Get productive with social media (and stay sane) | Lifehacker
How much time do you spend on social media? | ReadWriteWeb
Social media networking and ROI: How to maximize value and minimize cost | DoshDosh
Scoble has a productivity problem | Scobleizer
The social media time crisis | Colin Walker
Steps toward social simplification | One Little Cog
Don’t waste time on social networking! | Money.Power.Wisdom.
10 simple steps to social media success in 2008 | Search Engine Land
Avoiding information and conversation overload from social media | Search Engine Guide
Social media efficiency - avoiding social media procrastination |
Six productivity tips to use social media | Academic Productivity
Spend much time on social networking? | Affordable Internet Marketing
Social network pruning heuristic series | Andy DeSoto
Aggregators and cross-posters
20 ways to aggregate your social networking profiles | Mashable
FriendFeed Tips Series | Louis Gray
A simple and easy way to manage all of your social networking needs | Snakeyes’ Confession of a Dangerous Mind
Web 2.0 inefficiency | Publishing 2.0
Myspace/Facebook best practices | The Student Affairs Blog
12 ways to use Facebook professionally | Web Worker Daily
The corporate worker’s guide to evaluating a Facebook profile | Pimp Your Work
My essential Twitter tools | Jeremiah Owyang
35 Twitter tips from 35 Twitter users | Problogger
Get smarter and more productive on Twitter | Lifehacker
Did I miss something? Feel free to shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll add it in. The more resources at hand, the better!
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9 Comments
Thanks for the inclusion on the list, there’s some pretty good resources there which I’ll have to skim through. I’m currently looking at how our usage differs based on whether we are casual users or more involved (such as bloggers, early adopters, etc.) and the difficulties we face disconnecting.
Awesome post Andy - some i hadn’t been aware of
Excellent post, Andy! Time is a precious commodity, and social networking is becoming more of a time sink, it seems.
Just add me a friend everywhere
That sounds like some mighty interesting material. Please let me know, if you can, when you come up with any conclusions! I’d love to her about them in more detail.
Drop by again soon!
It’s true. And it doesn’t make any sense that ’social networking’ should entail us actually being less social.
I like that approach!
Thanks for reading, Zaibatsu!
Believe it or not, it was actually tricky coming up with enough material for this list– little is out there on being efficient and effective with social networks. Glad we’re able to add to this limited resource!
Thanks for commenting!
There are no conclusions per se but the post is up: http://colinwalker.me.uk/2008/07/09/social-medi...