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Personally, I leave twitter and the rest on (although my facebook usage has gone through the floor in the last month) as I find it helps my productivity and keeps me up to date with the blogs that I'm interested in. Of course there is loads of 'noise' but it doesn't seem to get in the way too much.
Then again, if I was following x,000 twitterers I'd be distracted too.
My main goal at the moment is to get my f****** bags back from British Airways. 13 days w/o half my clothes is pretty irritating.
But if you'd seen my tweets over the last two weeks you'd all know that!
-pc.
But I still remember that ol' 'Productivity 101' saying, "If you want to achieve in the quickest time possible, focus on one thing at a time and don't stop until it's completed; then move onto the next item in your priority/todo list"
as much as I enjoy reading your blog and following what you do and produce, but: welcome to the blindingly obvious!
To achieve, define attainable goals and cut out the noise.
In any case, keep up the good work - your reports and videos have added value to my life. Thanks for that.
I only am available via email, facebook, Skype or other services where people dont expect an immediate response. So I dont feel to quilty when I dont get back in touch with them ASAP. My rule is too check my accounts in the mournings, and in the evenings so worst case is you will have to wait 12 hours for a response. So far it works out pretty well for me, my stress levels are lower. I am far more productive.
I too have been wondering about this as lately, I have been quite addicted to twitter... I have also been pondering about your belief that it is better to follow people than people following you.
Hence, I have taken the liberty to add people on twitter (though not as much as yours) but I must admit that I have picked up a lot of great resources and ideas just from following people such as yourself.
However, this has also taken quite a toll on me because most of the time I have twitter going off through my mobile. When I'm at work I have it on silent and I still have it on when I go to sleep (on silent of course).
Sometimes, I don't want to miss out on something that may be really important. So, i reread the posts in there when I'm on the bus and the train to go to work and the same when I get home from work to home.
I'm lucky that I'm not on facebook (yet)! Don't use flickr much nor youtube but I have friendfeed and if I find that I can somehow integrate friendfeed on my mobile - well.. I'll definitely need to prioritise..
What I'm trying to say is, even on twitter itself I find that it's taking up a lot of my time and I don't know how you can keep up, especially following just over 19,000 people let alone answering over 5,000 emails. I have to commend you for that.
And you're right, when push comes to shove (such as being stuck in an airplane for 10 hours) and there's nothing else but do what you have to do under the circumstance - you just do it.
cheers,
Armand
from Down Under
The only problem with making a blanket statement like this is that it ignores the natural work style of the person involved. Is what you're saying generally good advice? Yes. Is it something that applies to everyone? No. I'm not even convinced that it applies to a majority.
One of the interesting things about people diagnosed with Adult ADD/ADHD is that they are frequently not just good multi-taskers, they are frequently horrible single-taskers. They require multiple sensory inputs simultaneously to keep their brains able to focus in a given area. A good friend of mine is this way, and he simply cannot focus on anything difficult without having music in the background.
Related to this is how accustomed the person is to the presence of Twitter/IMs/Email and so forth. There are all sorts of ways to deal with this in times of "high focus," and most programmer types figure this out pretty quickly, or they stop being programmer types. Much of this is true with writing as well.
I might just as well say, "Not productive enough as a telecommuter? Go back to the office!" After all, there are all sorts of non-work distractions at home... right? High productivity demands discipline of some sort, and for some, that will mean "turn off the Internet." For others, it will mean "turn on some 80's punk rock, really loud."
To each his own. - Tim
you have some good points there. But i think that the usefulness of a service and the productiveness of a person depends on what he is trying to achieve with his social network at the moment. I'm sure you have a gigantic social network of contacts and try to maintain it. I have a small internet audience yet and try to extend it. Twitter and dropping comments and visiting blogs is good for extending your social net. Answering Email and being offline is good when you dont want to extend it because you already have the real 50 social contacts a human needs to be a happy person.
So the universal IT answer applies: "It depends".
In NLP terms: We might share the same planet, but we should accept that our world is different. :-)
I like what you do btw :-)
But it simply is impossible to maintain my social contacts on twitter and follow you there at the same time. OVERLOAD :-)
Best Wishes,
Joerg :-)
It is amazing how productive I am when I do intentionally close all of my opened applications and concentrate on a single task.
I figured flying would actually leave you unproductive, but it's nice to find that you CAN actually get things done while offline and you might be more inclined to just do it just because you're offline.
Methinks your next book will have to do with productivity. You seem very focused on that lately.
For me, it seems like distractions are just distractions. Whether it's the internet, alcohol, gambling, politics, tech, etc., if it is pulling you away from your goals and values, it's probably worth reexamining your present state. Dude, your life is experiencing stack overflow. Don't wait to study the crash logs to figure out what happened.
If something looks like it's getting in my way, I take a step back and evaluate where I think I'm going, and whether this is just a distraction, or a potential asset in attaining my goal. Most of the time, a distraction is where I retreat when I'm overwhelmed or confused or frustrated or afraid. Or all of those. And certainly, we live in a time where a clear look around outside your bubble makes for plausible rationale for the need to be distracted.
My grandpa used to say, "What's the worst that can happen? It can't eat you."
Okay, maybe he wasn't talking about the internet.
Welcome to the UK.
You're never more than ten seconds away from a CCTV camera watching your every move.
Be careful Schobie.
Pete.
Once you're hooked...
Um, I don't want to insult anybody, but wasn't this blindingly obvious from the beginning?
It's true that if you want to "scoop" everybody else you have to have many tendrils out there collecting information. But the dirty little "secret" is that is is a rigged game. If you are not Walt Mossberg or David Pogue you won't be the first person to hear about new gadgets, or if by some chance you do, you and your twitter pal are going to be subject to lawsuits.
So that leaves these mostly noise, little signal vehicles for idle chit chat and even more idle speculation. Most of what I've seen from Twitter (and all the other products you name) is either erroneous, irrelevant, or as I called it, idle chit chat, which may be entertaining, but isn't productive.
Related to the potential of Twitter to be a distraction, and the huge number of people Robert follows, I'd like to introduce something I'm calling the "Twitter Dilemma": what do you think is the maximum number of people you can reasonably follow on Twitter?
On one hand, a lot of people I know say 100-200, and anything beyond that and they aren't able to really follow what's happening. Interestingly, Dunbar's Number suggests that the max is around 150 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number).
On the other hand, I look at people like Robert, @ChrisBrogan and @JeffPulver, the mere fact they follow so many people… attracts even more people who in turn follow them, further building their popularity.
But does this really need to be an either or proposition?
What I really want from Twitter is to be able to "follow" several hundred people (that I check now and then as I have time) - and have a way to segment the people I'm following with a subset of "favorite people I'm following" (close friends, family and people who always have something compelling to say), a subset that I don't want to miss anything they Tweet.
If you're using Twitter in an interesting way, I'd like to follow you, do ping me there at http://www.twitter.com/davideckoff
I also think you are in the minority, where everything you do is followed by your followers and you follow everything your followers do. Of course minority to me may appear to be a majority for you (and viceversa), since having a group of 200+ technorati followers would seem like a lot of people (and it is a ridiculously large amount of people). I mean, you can hardly count 5,250 emails a normal thing; furthermore, how many of those 5000+ emails are really important? Sure, they are important in the "fan mail" sense, but are they really important?
Your professional world is an interesting niche, but it seems to be the same group always twittering about this or that. Not much variety, as what you are covering is being covered by 10 other people (group think comes to play here, I think). It's like a geek celebrity reality soap opera, similar to the big brother show (from what I can gather from the title, as I've never seen the actual TV show).
There surely is some value being generated. How else would you explain companies hiring you to do what you do. It is promotional? Is it the new economy? I don't know yet, as I still haven't quite figure out what it is; however, I don't really understand the celebrity centric media in the USA either, and that is a large industry (Britney alone generates hundreds of millions of dollars just being/acting crazy). Somehow, I think they are related.
Anyway, I'll keep on watching/reading. It does make for good intrigue, sometimes. And, of course, there are sometimes some interesting companies mentioned in all the noise.
And catching up? Good luck, nowadays. There's too much you'll have missed.
Same difference. More productivity.
Buffett said if you have 20 great ideas in your life you're doing very well......this was a couple of years ago and at that time he said he hadn't even reached 20 yet.
He returned to Omaha from NY because they tried to come up with 20 great ideas before lunch.
Unplugging from the clutter and noise certainly hasn't hurt him any. It's a good lesson.
The trick as a video journalist is to find a way to have those good conversations, to make them easily accessable to your audience, and to discipline yourself against the CPA barrage of Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook,gigantic inbaskets in both email and google reader and the overwhelming desire to be "friended" by everyone.
I KNOW that you are smart enough to design FASTCOMPANYTV to be more than just another addition to the CPA cacaphony that plagues the Web.
Looking forward to your posts from Israel.
Goals are extremely important in life as they keep us alive! I found I am most productive either early in the morning when everything is quiet (and I hate waking up early) or late at night when everything is quiet.
Well' here's another comment to keep up with... and here's to having at least 1 great conversation everyday!
http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/05/email-aint-goi...
Many of us have shunned the likes of Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed for that very reason. They are too demanding on our time.
I see exactly why they would be valueable for someone like you, and I find it quite normal that you use them. For me, they're simple not worth it.
You know, this is a game we can't win. Asynchronous services such as email favour procrastrination and an ever mounting inbox. Synchronous services such as twitter completely wreck our workflow. The combination of both is death.
For me, the lesser evil is staying with email, using plain old IM when I need it, and cutting down on the number of contacts to those I care about. I couldn't care less about what I'm missing that way. Among other things, YOU won't miss that, and will keep us updated ;)
Thanks, Jordy
It certainly is not to have more followers on Twitter. I care not a hoot about that.
Here's my Life List. I much prefer to work on getting these things done.
Have you ever thought about just letting life happen? Interesting conversations that arise because of place and circumstance and people, rather than dictated by a check list?
Maybe what it takes to be a weblogger is to live a life in a permanent state of partial attention. I know I can't live the "connected" state anymore, more power to those that can, I guess.
But "interesting conversation every day"...how can you be meaningfully impacted by a conversation when you don't give yourself time to absorb all the nuances?
Oh well, whatever works for you.
I know the feeling too well.
And I feel strange when, after 2/3 straight hours of work I think: "I didn't miss email and rss feeds!" :)
I've worked at a client side for 2 days without any internet connection. Only internet access was remoting into a remote machine and that just gives me webmail. :-/
Had a few hours off waiting for some software to run an installation and script, in these few hours I sorted out my mailbox and did all the due administration work from the last few months, one actually feel as if a great weight has been lifted from one's shoulders.
It lets you specify which specific sites you want to turn off (Facebook, twitter, etc) instead of the whole internet.
Its got a ton of other features as well.
"If you’re one of that handful of people I mentioned, you can take real action - actually do something about information overload for scores of people in your organization...If you’re in a position to roll out RSS technology you can accelerate its entry into the organization."
I have a great deal of respect for the folks at Burton... they're top-flight pros to be sure, but I'm more than I bit skeptical on the issue of Enterprise Attention Management.
Here's my reply to Craig's Post:
Nah. Sorry, not buying it. Despite investing a modest sum in one of the three Enterprise RSS vendors, I'm not buying that it is going to solve information overload... in fact, it's likely to exacerbate the problem.
And I'm not the only one that E-RSS has been overreaching. I had an interesting conversation with one of the junior partners of the lead VC firm on the issue (keep in mind, he was a respected enterprise architect at one point in his career). He observed that administrating feeds, enhanced security, providing a new channel for notifications, etc... were all valid value propositions of E-RSS. But his take on the whole issues of solving information overload through heuristics, and Enterprise Attention Management, etc... was that it a great promise on the surface, but would be realized any time soon.
Also... there's a trend afoot to simply "unplug." As famed weblogger Robert Scoble recently asked, "What are your goals? Is it to have more followers on Twitter? Or is it to get something done today?" One commenter to Scoble's post (entitled "Not productive enough? Turn off the Internet") called the phenomenon "attention thieves."
Hat tip to Paul Chaney for noting the trend in his post "Social media pied-pipers disconnecting from the net." He also notes that Doc Searls is giving up on blogging and Hugh McLeod is deleting his twitter account.
To be clear, I still believe that E-RSS and social media have a valid and quantifiable value proposition... but we need to get real about solving the problem of information overload. To overreach in such a nascent arena is to hurt something that we're all vested in.
And finally, not to get to far afield, but I think we're also unintentionally diverting attention away from something that holds great strategic business value: mapping the heretofore hidden networks of tacit knowledge workers. It's equally as sexy - from a business value standpoint - and can be quickly codified through the repurposing of existing analytics/reporting packages.
See posts here: http://www.scottquick.com/ignite/managing-infor...
May be it will take some years may be after I find a girl in my life to actually feel what you are saying.
:)
Just knowing its there is distracting. But if I navigate away from the page, I can forget sometimes that it's there and GTD.
There is a way I deal with....and it is easy...
Install Firefox, Install LeechBlock Extension, Install MeeTimer and have a bit of determination.
It's about will power and ruling the noise, not letting it rule you.
Many people seem to not realise that there is a button on a mobile phone that turns it off. You don't need to get rid of it, just learn how to use it properly.
It is the same with RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and email.... you don't need to shut them down, you just need to know what you NEED them for, and use them as the tools that they are - but do not stray from that purpose, and do not let them rule you.