Paring Down
By Lon S. Cohen
I’m starting to pare down the number of things I’m involved in. What does this have to do with Social Media? Everything. Just take a look at any of the life stream or control panel type of Social Media applications like Ping.fm or Friendfeed that let you either repost from or post to all of your other so
cial media websites. There’s a million of them. OK more like a hundred, but you get the point.
There’s so many websites to get involved in and they all look so colorful and fun one ends up opening an account on too many and feeling guilty about ignoring them. Have I twittered lately? Am I feeding the Friendfeed beast? Am I commenting back? Did I select a list of songs? Updated my Wish lists? Write a review on Yelp?
Add in my three personal blogs and one blog for work among all my other duties managing the communications at work and I’ve just got too many distractions. (That doesn’t include my freelance writing.) In this economy, you need to be focused and with all the free toys out there on the web, I know that I get distracted. In reality, I’m only using Facebook, Twitter and maybe Friedfeed on a daily basis. I also want to make sure that my work is not taking away from my social life (the IRL one, I mean) and most importantly my family – especially my children. I used to be addicted to the laptop almost 24/7 either chatting, updating, blogging, writing, pitching, managing, consulting, and who knows what else! I’ve given out free advice, written long responses to associates who seek my expertise and then turn them all into a new blog post. I needed to come back to earth.
So I’ve made a conscious effort to pare down my social media, blogging and everything else to what’s really important. I haven’t made an official list (yet) but I do know in the back of my mind what I need to divert my full attention to:
1) Family most importantly my kids.
2) My full time job, which includes all related SM activities.
3) Freelance work that actually pays me money.
4) Looking for more paying work, either full-time or freelance.
5) Freelance that pays me in other ways like exposure and social capital.
6) Social Media including my Twitter obsession.
7) Personal blogging when inspired and when it doesn’t interfere with the above.
I am not advocating giving up the digital life in any way. I am probably becoming better at my digital life by not spreading myself so thin. I’m focusing on one or two endeavors at a time and letting some others that I started—and that only kept up out of some weird guilt for thinking about abandoning—die on the vine, at least for now.
I’ve given up my long form novel that I was researching, my extraneous blogs, my long comments and threaded conversations and most of all my free work. The economy is really bad and it’s looking like it’s not getting better very quickly or any time soon. It’ll be a long slog and to better prepare for what’s ahead, I need a tighter focus.
In good times, I tend to stray with side projects and pursuing endeavors that may or may not lead to a dead end. That’s OK. And I’m not saying in tough economic times, experimentation and innovation should stop either. I’m saying if I’m experimenting, I’d better damn well have a good plan beforehand and I’d better make sure there’s at least a faint light at the end of the tunnel instead of groping around in darkness.
What do you think? Do you have a priority list or have you decided to pare down recently? If so let me know about it.