Are Vampires Sucking the Time out of Your Day?

Let me take a guess. You are involved in social media, right? So, here is the guess. You have a smart phone, yes? You are on facebook, twitter, flickr, you tube, four square, yes? Or at least one of the above, yes? You stay in touch via email, BBM (Blackberry users) or text (sms) messages on that smart phone, yes? These social networking services give you a warm fuzzy feeling about your world and you feel in contact with them at your finger tips. Brilliant! I agree. So, why the title Time Vampires?

Communicating today is easier than ever before. Above I mentioned just 8 of the many, many ways we can communicate today. I only mentioned a few the English speaking networks I know of. There are many more in more other languages and countries out there. The draw back to the communication devices available today is that they can lead to being Time Vampires.

Time vampires are items in your life that suck time and concentration from your life and what you are supposed to be doing. I will explain with a simple example. One the smart phone you have an email with a facebook as well as a twitter account linked up to it. Let say you have about 150 facebook friends and 50 twitter followers that regularly update their profile. That’s 200 potential interruptions to your working day. Forget after hours! Let’s assume you get updates sent to your email. You are working and an email comes through to you phone. Bang! There goes your concentration. You click on the email to see the update and it’s not interesting so you close the window. It took 2 minutes. You are annoyed with me because what is 2 minutes out of a minute day! Do the math on up to 200 updates a day. That's if they are boring!

Another example is this: one of your friends on Flickr posts really nice photos and you have look - that's never going to be less than 5 minutes!

You must get the point!

Avoid time vampires in the following ways:

1. Different horses for different courses. Use different social media for what they are good at:

Facebook – Connecting with old friends and telling family and friends in other cities and or countries.

Twitter – Up to the minutes updates from everyone from everywhere about everything.

Flickr – Upload and view photos.

2. Social media is not a popularity contest.

Unless you are a big business or media darling or massive sports spar – the more does not mean better!

3. Use social media sites to add value to your life.

If using social media does not add value to your life – you are doing it wrong! This is true. Last year I deactivated my Facebook account and all except 2 people did not notice. This means that it was not adding value to my life. I now am back on Facebook and have cut my friends list substantially, in order to add value to my “social media” life.

Try these tips and feel free to add your own ways of avoiding “Time Vampires”