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”

Is It All a Popularity Contest?

I am relatively new to Twitter and Facebook and have not got many followers and friends. I got to a maximum of just over 100 followers on twitter and was following about 180 people. I did not manage to keep up with the people I was following. The people I

The curse of the English sports fan

Off the top of my head I can think of the following sportsmen and women from the UK who are at the top or at least in the top few percentage in their sport.

Lee Westwood and Luke Donald - golf

Jenson button - formula 1

Andy Murray - tennis

Mark Cavendish - possibly the fastest man in professional cycling peloton

A rugby league that attracts the top players from around the world.

Arguably the best football league in Europe, possibly the world.

A cricket league setup that has attracted the top players for many years.

The problem is that they are all cursed! I call it the curse of the English sports fan. Leading up to an event the English people are amazing in getting behind their sports teams / people - messages, dedications, flags on houses etc. That's enviable in my opinion. When I look at reports and the like from outside the country - I get the impression that the fans really believe that their team is the best and will win. The curse sets in when people just through a bit of doubt in when something happens before the event. A lot of it is sensationalism on behalf of the media to get a big story but the rest of it - no idea why it starts.

During the recent French open Andy Murray came up against Raphael Nadal and a twitter message I got (from an English person) was 'Andy Murray thinks he can beat Nadal - sorry Andy you can’t'. That’s ridiculous!! Top sportsmen have to believe they can win and one bit of doubt could mean not winning.

The curse continues after the event too. The media jump in and the people too. The people are very passionate and the support them team / people had goes from completely for to completely against and they play the blame game and blame everybody on the team and their dog before they will accept the truth about the outcome. This the gets buried, only to fester until the next time something happens and the skeletons get dragged out to haunt the next team even generations later!

England has an amazing sporting ability and infrastructure but the same structure that holds it up is tearing it down.

Double century!

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