If you are like most internet entrepreneurs, you will probably notice you spend a disproportionate amount of time checking Facebook, Twitter, your email or your web statistics. How much productivity does this cost you and how can you cut down on this productivity loss?
The True Price of Socializing
If you check your Facebook for just five minutes, two or three times a day, plus your email another two or three times a day, that doesn’t seem to be than very normal online behavior, but in reality, the costs are huge.
Let’s say each time you decide to check Facebook, it interrupts your concentration and costs you momentum in a project. In addition, it takes you an additional ten minutes or so to get back in the groove of what you were working on. While you are on Facebook, you might see a cool link or video, or perhaps a comment on a friend’s wall that you want to discuss; you then get sidetracked and spend an additional five or ten minutes. When you add it all up, each distraction could easily cost you fifteen to thirty minutes of productivity.
You can just check your email once at the beginning of your work day and once at the end and still address all the important emails in a very reasonable time frame. And even with 1,000 friends, you can easily view all the posts that were posted in a day in about twenty minutes by checking Facebook just once a day. The cuts in productivity aren’t necessary. You aren’t missing out on anything by streamlining your online social networking.
What to Do about It
As mentioned above, one very effective system is to just check your email or Facebook once at the beginning of the workday and/or at the end of the workday. If the interruptions feel like an addition, consider getting a site blocker for a short period of time. Even if it is just for two weeks, it can help you get in the habit. Set up the site blocker so Facebook.com, Gmail.com, Twitter.com, etc. aren’t accessible during work hours. That way you won’t even be tempted to access those websites.
Also consider trying a productivity monitoring system. These are systems that will watch how much time you spend on email, on work and on websites such as Facebook and report it to you at the end of the day. You will probably be shocked at how much time social networking takes when you see the numbers.
You now know how much online social networking can be costing you in terms of productivity. You also know a number of ways to break this habit. Remember that adding just an hour or two to your daily productivity can mean a lot of real money added to your bottom line in a few months of time.
