Anoop Verma
For many of us life has become too chaotic. This might not be only due to our demanding job or the pressures of personal life; it can also be due to the influx of many new technologies. Technology is designed to make your life simpler, but it is easy to get carried away when we are living amidst a plethora of devices, apps and social networks. You end up wasting lot of time on these new technologies, leading to a situation where the backlog keeps piling up and there is always some task that has to be put off until tomorrow… or the next day, or the day after.
However, we should not be too quick to blame technology. Technology is just a tool; it is up to the individuals how they use it. For many individuals, businesses and organisations, social networks like Facebook, Twitter serve as excellent productivity tools, but if you post status updates frequently, you can hardly do anything else. Majority of offices these days are resorting to blocking the social networks to ensure that the employees concentrate on their work. Does this work? I always argue that those who are not wasting their time on social networks have probably figured out something else to do to waste their time.
Here are some tips to enable you to avoid wasting time with apps and devices:
Ignore requests
You don’t need to respond immediately whenever anyone sends you a request or message on Facebook or elsewhere. Lot of people who add Facebook applications follow the prompts to send requests to all their friends. You can think of it as an open offer that can be ignored.
Stop the constant emails
The social networks are notorious for sending many spam mails to their users everyday. You might start getting alerts for every status update that your Facebook friends might make. And if you have few hundred Facebook friends, then you can imagine the number of alerts that you might have in a single day. To stop the barrage of alerts you should go to Account settings, then to Notifications. Here you can switch most of the options to “off.”
Avoid games
Playing online games on the social networks is a best way of wasting your valuable time and getting tagged as unproductive in office. You should avoid activities like games, or even decorating your profile. Your status updates should also be kept at a bare minimum.
Be invisible
You have a busy day ahead, and you log into your Gmail or Facebook account to check some important messages. Immediately an acquaintance of yours sends you an IM. Out of courtesy you send him a reply and then you stay on the chat for a while. Before you know it your focus has changed completely and you linger around checking some pictures, exploring groups and things like that. By the time you log out, an hour has been wasted. To avoid getting chat messages, you can use the option of being invisible. This way your friends won’t know that you are logged in and they won’t be able to IM you.
Quit social networks
In case you are simply unable to wean yourself away from indulging in time-wasting activities on the social networks, you should think of quitting Facebook, Twitter, etc.
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