Social media, albeit being a great boon in many regards, has also become a massive time suck for almost everyone involved!  Sure, news is up to date, down the the minute, almost real-time with every single little bit of craziness there to read about right now!  The t0-read, to-do, to-make, to-code lists all keep getting longer and longer and longer…

…and then…

Crickets.

That’s right, you might as well be listening to crickets.  Social media is killing many productive people’s productiveness.  I’ve decided I’m going to take a break, of some sort, just not sure what kind.  Maybe I’ll schedule myself some “social media time” or something.  Similar to “TV Time” for kids.  If only parents were better about that, maybe social media wouldn’t be the ADD person’s massive time blow that it is.  Well, as I write this I’ve determined the following.

Twitter

I’m going to time box the activity and use specific tools that enable me to effectively use the social media services.  Twitter, that needs to be done on a PC with Seesmic or something that allows me to truly and quickly interact.  None of this half-assed mobile super phone poking about on the Blackberry, or twiddling about with Twitter on the iPad.  Those other tools just don’t allow the speed and ease of viewing links and other such things that using a full on PC with power allows.  I want to get in, see what’s up, filter the crap I don’t want to read out of the way, tweet, and get the hell out of there.  I want bus time, walking time, and other activities back for other uses.  I want to just read a book, or just take a walk again.  No twittering while riding or walking anymore.  Done.  Gone.  Zilch.

My time box at this time is going to be limited to 15 minutes a day.  In the morning and in the evening sometime.  In that time I have the following things I need to straighten out;

• Get synced up on who I am and am not following, and review my list of recent followers to see who I should be following.
• Find a better way to track tweets.  Lists are useful, but there needs to be something more.  Maybe Paper.li or something of that sort.

Both of these tasks need knocked out with the time boxing I’ve allocated.

Facebook

This I’ve already relegated to minimal use.  I might use it about 15 minutes to 2 hrs a week.  I’m actually amazed at this fact.  Simply, I have a Facebook Profile because one kind of needs to have one being in the technology industry.  Also it provides a great avenue for keeping in touch with people that I might otherwise not be in touch with.  It’s good to know people I grew up with are doing well, providing a little morale boost here and there.  🙂  Plus, one never knows when a blast from the past might turn out to be a great friend, asset, or network contact here in the present!

Time boxing for Facebook is going to be limited to 5-10 minutes per day.

Blogging Here @ CompositeCode.com or elsewhere…

This is something that I find truly useful.  Not the time suck like these other web apps.  So really I’m not going to time box myself or set some arbitrary limit.  I am going to continue striving to have at minimum a blog entry per week.  One that is partially useful, even if it is just to review what I’ve done for the week, conferences or meetups I’ve attended, or something of that sort.  Hopefully I’ll be able to maintain some actual useful code how-to, cloud computing write ups, and other legit, honest to goodness, readable entries as well.  🙂

So no time box for blogging, this is something I truly love to do.  Write, write, and more writing.

With that I’m off to find some time tracking software to help myself stay in the time boxes I’ve set.  Cheers, and happy holidays!