Anyone who spends much time on the computer is aware how easy it is to fanny around instead of doing what you are supposed to.

I just had a very worrying calculation.  I probably spend 20 minutes in the morning looking on Facebook and twitter, same again at lunch and the same again in the evening. This is a very conservative figure. Get sucked into a debate on a forum and that gets multiplied. So – one hour a day (conservatively) = 365 hours a year = 15.2 days (make it 16 waking hours in a day instead of 24 and it jumps up to 22 days!)  I mean seriously,  my two week vacation has just been spent entirely on Facebook!  Fuck Me!

My two week vacation has just been spent entirely on Facebook!

Imagine the creativity that is lost because of it.

At the moment I am in the middle of finishing a commissioned video for a client. Tell me if this resonates with you;

Turn on the machine, just check the emails. Open the browser, click ‘F’ go to Facebook. Click the notification icon, look for comments, go and read them, and comment of course if necessary. Look at the group pages to see if there are any new topics. Then go the the timeline and scroll down. Pop over to Twitter, answer the messages, check the notifications, and scroll through the first bunch of tweets.  That little process has just cost me 30 minutes of my life. This little process happens more than once a day, so the calculation at the top is not extraordinary, it is probably quite a conservative estimate.  It makes me realise why I seem to get so little done nowadays when I used to be so productive.

So how are we supposed to handle this? Those of us who are involved in social media, for whatever reason, whether it be business, interest or networking, there is just no denying that it is a massive time waster.

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