Time management

I am a fun of the social media from the very beginning: a Facebook account, a Twitter account, various professional networks. I tried to be a trend follower, but wanted to be among the first to see the whole evolution and the changes occurred. And there are tremendous changes, in only a couple of years, even months.

A big problem I encountered in the next month, as the 2.0 activity increased, as my professional interests as well: I need a tremendous amount of time to check, read, select, use and send further an impressive amount of information. Take for example Twitter, where the number of the persons I follow is more than 200: in 5 minutes, at 11-12 o'clock, I receive around 21 updates. Most part of the updates, are related to relevant domains: social design, writing, various political and social activities, academic information. I do speed reading, but still I need time. And perseverance to switch from a news to another, while keeping my offline schedule - including long hours of meetings, business lunches etc. When I am back, the flow of information is entering my world from all directions, so I usually need more than one hour for processing the information.

It is addictive and cutting serious chances to maintain your normal real life interaction. But, in a lot of cases, the information provided via various channels offered me tremendous help in finding new business and academic opportunities and improving my knowledge in various domains.

What to do with my time, though?

For at least two weeks I implemented a very careful system of periods dedicated to this online activities: chat, finding new opportunities, reading and forwarding articles, registering for webinars. When I am very busy during the day, I prefer to perform these operations three time the day, for 40 minutes: early in the morning, while sipping my coffee; during the lunch break; late in the evening. In between, I am trying to catch some time too for writing for various classes and book projects plus blogging - at least two hours the day - and reading - various documentations.

And, of course, at least once the week I take the freedom to refuse to stay too much connected, but going out to look for proper human inspiration.

Time management is everything, but life is everywhere.