056 Using Social Media Productively

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:20
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen to productivitycast. Welcome to our listeners. For today’s episode, I’m just going to get right into it. Today’s episode is actually a jam packed episode where we’re going to talk about social media and how to use it productively. And the conversation is going to be divided into three parts, we’re going to talk about whether or not social media is doing harm to personal productivity writ large. And then we’re going to move the conversation into some of the pros and cons of social media as it relates to PR productivity. And then finally, we’re going to have a conversation about what can we all do with our use of social media in our productive lives. And so I’d like us to just really kick it right off with agree or disagree. Social media is doing more harm than good. for personal productivity.

Augusto Pinaud 1:22
I think I agree on that statement, you know, it is one of the problem with social media is that we take for us truth, a 40 and 140 characters statement, okay, doesn’t matter, the length is statement. But the fact is, you find two or three people and say, Oh, if so and so said that that needs to be truth. And we stop the research and process that in personal productivity is important. personal productivity is not a cookie cutter, you know, he’s not every site, every size fits everybody, I’m not every solution. It’s good for everybody. But when you just take it for granted, or whatever he said, what happened is you stop analyzing the positive that can or cannot be half what the impact that certain solution or certain thing could have on your own system and on your own life, that produce people changing more often that needed that produce as a result or less effective

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:30
productivity. So your argument is that people need to maybe take a step back from the social media world and take stock of what they’re doing. And strategically using social media

Augusto Pinaud 2:45
people these use in social media as a research tool, and it’s never was never intended for that. So the problem is, you go into the link, and then you go into the rabbit holes, but never get anywhere,

Francis Wade 2:57
I think it’s the sum of our experiences proven that they are very powerful tools. They do very sort of amazing things that could not be done in any other way. There’s no way to accomplish being connected with so many people. So efficiently. However, I think that we, we’ve pretty much gone into the use of social media, with our eyes closed, kind of just blindly trusting whichever one we happen to be using. And the creators of the different apps and the different sites are, have become aware, skillful at sort of maintaining our attention. And we’ve just been a guest, like guinea pigs, rabbits, just kind of following along pretty blindly. I think we’re sort of waking up to the fact that not all the behaviors that we’re engaging in are beneficial to us that only engaging in social media has a a huge downside. And I think it’s more a case of it’s very powerful, there’s huge benefits, there are also huge downsides. And we’re just sort of waking up to the downsides and asking ourselves, is this worth it? I think net net, it is worth it. Because the fact that we’re abusing the tools are not using them well doesn’t mean that they can’t be used well, and they can’t keep giving us the benefits that we want. I think it’s a matter of awareness. And sort of understanding that the the by the creators of social media we are they want to lure us into a particular kind of behavior or habit. And we need to be aware of that. And regardless of their inducements, sort of choose the ones that work for us, the ones that are most productive. In other words,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:50
I’m in I’m on the side that yes, social media is doing harm in some way, shape, or form, but probably not more then good. From a personal productivity perspective, on the on the end mass as a whole to the to people, you know, in general, I do believe that social media can be used poorly. And I think that’s what you’re speaking to both Cousteau and Francis is that there is a, a ripe opportunity here for people to be able to use social media in positive ways. But because it’s addictive, and that really comes down to the way in which the software is designed. It’s designed to be addictive, that we then get time mismanagement, because social media success into things that we maybe should not be paying attention to, that we should not be attending to content that doesn’t apply to us doesn’t matter in the greater perspective in life. And what that ultimately means is that people are set lower boundaries for what is quality, and what’s worth bringing into their focus. And I think that’s the that’s the real problem is that we are now raising a set of of our, you know, people are young people are being raised in such a way that they are not learning how to differentiate the latest and loudest as David Allen would say, from the quality, slow, deep, thoughtful, intense, conversational modality that’s required for us to have creative thoughts and do the pattern recognition, and to have reflection, and to have silence and to navigate emotional regulation as it relates to boredom and other kinds of uncomfortable feelings. Not in a fast paced, fury driven world. And I think I think because of that, it creates some productive downstream problems. And I’d like to discuss some of those now, which are, what do you believe are, are ultimately the pros and cons of social media, social media itself, sits on top of a wide variety of social technologies. And so that listeners have an understanding, as I teach social media in a small business context, I’m constantly forced to teach people that there are 30, plus different types of social technologies from the wiki, which is the software that runs large sites like Wikipedia, to a blog, a blog is a form of social media, it’s a it’s a post that other people are capable of, of engaging with. So if you look at the term social, social, meaning that many people can collaborate and engage on that piece of content, the media doesn’t really particularly matter. It could be audio, it could be video, it could be text, it could be pictures. All of those are types of media, we tend to focus on Facebook, and social networks, that is external social networks. And so external social networks, Facebook, internal social networks would be something akin to a Facebook group, where you have this internal group of people within the larger social network, or the larger external social network. And so all of these types of media are and can be socialized. It just ultimately ends up being what is good about them. And what’s bad about them is the way in which we use them potentially, and or the way in which they’re designed. That is the way in which the developers are moving users in a particular dimension.

Francis Wade 8:48
Recently, I start I, I sort of engaged in the process of setting up a community, which has all the words a formal social media. So I had to think through the behaviors that I would like my community members to engage in, because I’m sort of starting from scratch. And I’ve learned that the behaviors I want them to engage in once they jumped with first to join, once they join, what they do in the first three days, what they do, in the ensuing weeks, is critically important to their engagement to their a getting value, and be sticking around for the long term and being of value to this new community and to my business as well. So I’ve been on the the creating side trying to think through, I guess what some of the things that, you know, the big the big boys also think through. And it’s a pretty challenging process, because the the pros and if I just stick to the pros, the pros are obvious to me, but they’re not obvious to someone who’s joining. And the person needs to be be sold in some way so that they join. And then once they join, they need to have an experience an immediate experience of the benefits, such as interacting with people that they otherwise wouldn’t meet. Because this is a network professional network of HR professionals in this case of asking questions, answering questions, supporting people they don’t know, in, you know, in faraway locations, there’s a number of behaviors that they’re not used to doing and used to engaging and it became so much of a problem that actually created a program, a training within my network called How to be a great community member. And it you know, I made some deep dives into what has got to be called sociology, I guess, to try and explain why you you won’t get benefits if you don’t engage in certain behaviors. And at the onset, some of these behaviors may seem to be risky, they may see they may take you out of your comfort zone. And they are the only way to achieve value from being in a social network. So the pros have to do with other people and the interaction between people, sort of peer to peer. The other pros include improving your skills over time. So there’s some gamification that is built into every social network, where your skills improve over time, and you become a better member, there is an opportunity to build your brand, if you’re someone who’s in any kind of social network is an updated read leadership at any level, as long as you sort of keep keep with it and keep growing as an individual. But you’re better off if you’re doing these things consciously, as opposed to unconsciously, which I think is what happens, what happens a lot on Facebook, if you know what you’re doing, and you’re doing it deliberately, then you’re far better off your how we more access to all of the pros, or the benefits that could accrue.

Augusto Pinaud 12:05
And I think that’s the key, the consciously part, you know, it’s not the tool, the tool, the tool doesn’t matter. It is the how you are approaching the tool. You know, if you think many years back, okay, when people started moving, you know, to the web, you know, I wrote, when I wrote 25 tips for productivity. Many years ago, one of the things that I was encouraging people, okay, even before that book went out was you need to leave into different browsers, okay? Why, because now you spend so much time on the web, that you your brain doesn’t know when you need to engage on fun. And when you need to engage on work on when you do that, all that on the same browser, your brain doesn’t know what you’re doing. So what happened is, people right in the middle of the day, and they’re working, and then suddenly they think about cookies, open another tab cookies, chocolate cookies, and the next thing they happen is they waste two or three hours, looking at recipes of cookies. And what I said at that time, and I still said this day is you should have, you should work on two different browsers. It’s not done go and look, the cookies is changed browsers go to if you work on Google Chrome, then go open a window in Safari, and then spend the time you want to spend looking at cookies. But what that produce on the brain is that the brain knows you are not working. So depending the time of the day, your environment, you have a higher chance to snap out of that and go back to focus on work. Social media has happened the same, to have the same problem except that you cannot have different tools, you cannot have, well, this is my professional Twitter. And now let me bring my fun to Okay, or Facebook or any of the social media for that matter, not even LinkedIn. So what happened was that is, it’s much, much easier to stay on the rabbit trail to go unconscious into what you are doing. Instead of going there with a purpose, the purpose can be have fun and relax. That is a purpose. But you need to have that clear purpose before you even engage what I think tend to happen, people I talked to people like I coach on to work with is they go into the social media, rabbit holes, with no purpose. Okay, I’m boring. Let me open Twitter accounts, sometimes not even conscious and just open Twitter, okay, or a Facebook or any of them. And then the next thing they know is they spend 45 minutes to an hour reading junk. Okay, when do you go now into the realm of the personal productivity? It’s even worse, because people in many cases are not stopping us. Okay, what is the problem I’m having? They are looking for the solution before even identify the problem. Okay, I’m having a problem. Okay. Let me go now to the social media and find out how people solve the problem. But if you stop them, there are cannons. Okay. Are you conscious of the problem you have? For most people? The answer is now they’re just looking for the miracle tool. And is what social media now produce is the ability to find an unlimited set of wonderful tools, and unlimited set of miracle tools. And then what it does for people is they never slow down enough to identify the problem. But in the next three weeks, they will have test 16 different solutions for the problem they don’t know they have, or they don’t understand. Well, they have,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:59
I’m going to take a look bit of a different flavor on this. Because I am someone who is very compartmentalize as it relates to my social media use, since I teach it a lot in my my work with small business owners, I have a need to disconnect from it. So I’ve created all of these various forms of walls between my personal social media use and my work related social media use otherwise, it could potentially consume my entire day. So I would like to talk a little bit about how we can compartmentalize in some way, shape or form. But in the columns of pros, I tend to see social media as having the value of being able to connect people connecting is something that different than any other way in history, the speed and access to people that we once would never consider we now have today, for example, I can Tweet at one of the princes of England, you know, it’s it’s, it’s remarkable that you can you can tweet at the president united states, you can you can Instagram with Beyonce, you know, it’s maybe they will respond to you, maybe they won’t read your message, you are able to engage in a conversation with the larger community of people who are interacting and engaging with those celebrity figures, influencers, and otherwise connectors in an environment. And perhaps you’re the connector, so people are engaging with you, but they’re also engaging with others who fall inside that sphere of influence around you. And I think that kind of omni directional collaboration and connection is a very, very powerful way to both create relationships to create meaning in those relationships, as well as to maintain relationships across large distances. Facebook is the is the primary example of this. But now we’re seeing that kind of migration from Facebook, social network style, maintenance of relationships to WhatsApp and telegram and other kinds of applications that allow you to maintain those relationships in private chat or you know, social chatting applications. So you can maintain relationships, I love to keep up with news via applications, my preferred is Twitter. And I’m not necessarily keeping up on salacious news, I’m just trying to keep up on the news of the day. And Twitter is just doing a very good job of being able to keep me up to date in terms of not just big broad news about domestic and international issues, but also news that is related to organizations and people and things that I also care about. So I’m following to be able to be notified that these maybe events or other kinds of occurrences are happening. And because this organization or person is not putting up with press releases, they’re not going to be seen in mainstream media or in print publications or anything like that. And then finally, is, is learning there is a, there is a huge amount of learning that happens in social media, because of your ability to collaborate with others in the learning process, I have found numerous ways in which to be able to engage in my love of languages. And so I I enjoy learning foreign languages and learning about culture. And social media has given me that that extension and ability to do that, that I would not be able to do in an analog world. Some of the some of the downsides, some of the cons I see with social media, at least as it relates to your productive world is that it can create a myopic view of the world. So you can kind of get sucked into unproductive chatter and be and start to see the world in a, in a limited view. And that can be detrimental to you being productive, because being productive means looking at the various ways in which you can engage with your work. And, and, and going and doing that. And I think that social media can be very useful in opening up your experience your world and worldview. And I think the myopic worldview is a negative again, that’s a personal opinion. And then of course, there are the trolls, trolls on social media can just be a huge productive hit. And you see these people who or machines that are bots that are online, just pouring out chatter, that is unproductive conversation, either to incite, you know, argument or to misinform you. And otherwise, they’re there. They’re nonsensical, and useless. But so many people get captivated by the content conflict associated with it, that it becomes an unproductive use of the medium. Okay, so those are my pros and cons. But

Augusto Pinaud 21:08
you see, I agree on your pros understands that most of them that you mentioned, if not all, you know, we’re super conscious, it’s not you don’t go to social media to see what you find you go to because of all those reasons. On the negative side. Yeah, but the trolls are, you know, the trolls have will always be there. I mean, the reality is, people love conflict, you know, people feed out of conflict, it make them feel powerful, for whatever reason. So social media, I agree with you has allow these people to even gain more avenues to, to engage into that kind of behavior. But to know, it was with some of the good things of social media, obviously, that comes in and there is nothing we can do about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:59
Yeah, that takes us over to kind of what what can we do to make social media more effective and more efficient in our productive lives. And really, with the trolls, I am a very big proponent of and remember, trolls don’t have to be we have a lot of discussion today about trolls being foreign governments that are engaging in misinformation campaigns, and very sophisticated, whatever. But what I care about if you have a mentally ill on Sally, who causes a lot of conflict in your, in your on your Facebook profile, you know, she constantly comments on your posts, and, you know, puts out misinformation in and around your family that creates a level of conflict and unproductive conversation, that maybe it is productive conversation, because you’re like, Okay, well on Sally need some some help. But beyond that, you know, it’s one of those cases where that’s the kind of problem that really takes away from your productivity, you can ignore the the political and all the other kind of larger conversations that are happening on social media. But if these conversations are happening at work, say you’re using Yammer, in your company, and, and there’s somebody who is, is misusing it and trolling the company’s social network, then you need to be able to limit either that person or that kind of conversation and filter out those conversations. And so I think that would be the first, like, my first step in any situation like that is to look how you can filter out those conversations. There’s a really cool Google Chrome extension, and I’m looking it up right now while we’re talking. And it allows you to change the terminology of, of everything you see in your browser. So say you, if you don’t want to see the word cat, on any website, you can change it to a different word. You know, there are ways in which you can filter in almost every social network. And I think it’s important for you to be able to effectively use those filters for getting, getting conversations down to the essential that you the essential conversations that you want to be having, and getting rid of the ones that are negative that are that are not healthy for you to be having, I think it’s, it’s totally appropriate for you to be challenged. But it’s inappropriate for there to be an unhealthy conversation space, where you’re you are constantly feeling like you are attacked, or the people around you are being attacked, without there being a productive, you know, output of something on the other side. And, and I think that’s up to the community managers to be able to, you know, make that happen. But I think it’s also you behooves us as the individual within any social network, or any social media to stand up for the larger groups, advocacy, by making sure that you’re not engaging in those kinds of unproductive, and unhealthy conversations,

Augusto Pinaud 25:14
understand why you’re coming to social media, you know, understand how you are interacting with social media, okay, since, as Francis was saying early for his community, in the same way he create, you know, that training those courses, well stop for a little bit and think, Okay, why I’m going to social media, and what I’m trying to get out of social media, and how I want to portrayed myself into social media. That way, in the same way to go to that training to be part of that community, do you do it for yourself, this is what is important to me on you know, what, I don’t want to be a troll, okay? Good, that means you are not going to have opportunity to be a troll all you will have plenty. But as soon as you define that, then the next time the troll opportunity comes, you can make the decision to say you know what, now, I don’t want to be a troll, therefore, I’m not going to. So I’m not going to engage into that. That kind of things is one of the ways to make, you know, the social media more positive. I think what kind of stuff you’re going to share, okay, there is enough hatred in social media, you know, to really make the world a worse place, I worst place, then make the conscious decision, I’m not sharing any of that stuff. And once you start setting those rules for yourself, okay, in the same way, you know, privacy, as you said, in first community, then you will start getting a different approach to social media, then you start looking that the actions you’re taking on the information, you’re looking into social media, half a million, half a recent, then you can start getting a more positive spin, hey, the information is there. There is it’s not the social media is good or bad social media is just a medium, in the same way during history books at some times where, you know, but vehicle so this wasn’t the book. It’s not the social media is not the internet is how we are using that. What are the rules of engagements we are allowing ourselves to, to be part of, to really change this spend you have on social media, the first one of those is to be conscious about what you are doing with social media, and what you are not. You know, the reason that two browsers I mentioned early works so well, is because it breaks the unconscious, now allows you to be conscious, you know what, Jess, I’m going to spend in the next two hours looking about cookie recipes, because I want a cookie, that’s good. There is nothing wrong about that, when it is a conscious decision, is the same thing with social media, until you can make the conscious decision, you know what, I’m going to spend the next two hours reading about trolls great. But then it’s now a conscious decision. That’s how you’re going to be investing those two hours. That’s my opinion, the way to give her to give social media start giving social media a better spin.

Francis Wade 28:40
Yeah, I’m, I’m kind of hoping that the creators of social media, the managers are engaged in some of the thinking that that I’ve been sort of forced to engage in, and I hope that they are, for example, predicting or expecting that we, along the lines of what the booster saying we will become conscious, more conscious. We, we the users are becoming more aware of the inducements and how you can get lost in social media. And we’re thinking know more about the behaviors that we would prefer to choose rather than ones that we fall into. And I think if they’re thinking about that we’re getting smarter, and they hope to stay one step ahead. I hope they’re putting things like just basic, how much time am I spending on, let’s say, Facebook, each day, just you know, Facebook knows it, they collect that kind of information, they don’t tell it to us. And if you crash platforms, it’s really difficult to figure out as iPhone, because you know, there’s not one app that collects Facebook time, or social media time across all platforms. They will also tell you things like, what did you do when you were on Facebook, here are the sites that you visited, here is what you saw in your stream, here’s what percentage of it was people that you know, here’s how much of it was was just viral nonsense. So there’s a quality measure that you would get back in terms of your daily visits, that tells you how well you’re using social, particular platform. So those are a couple of just straightforward examples of the kind of information I hope they are measuring. And plan to tell us what we’re doing. Because ultimately, you know, boosters, right? There’s a set of behaviors that don’t work for us. But on the on the contrary, on the other side, like I mentioned, with respect to that training, and putting together there’s a bunch of behaviors that do work for us. Like, for example, when I get onto Facebook, and I’m doing business activity, for my my company’s pages, those are value added activities that I would want to continue on a repetitive basis. So but I’m not, I’m not thinking of necessarily of what activities are, I’m going to engage. And when I get on social networks, I’m not thinking of the practices I’m about to employ in the next half an hour, when I make this particular visit, instead, you know, I get on to do one thing, one thing turns into another before I know it’s an hour has gone. So there’s a relationship between my awareness of my behaviors, and the metrics I could use that a company could give me. And if a two were far better than they are today, I could, we could all keep using social media, because it’d be a nice fit between what we expect to get, and what we actually get. I think we’re always off from that.

Augusto Pinaud 31:45
And on those lines, and I ever recommend this to people who still need to be pretty engaged and is Don use every device for social media. You know, in the same way, I advise people stop checking in on your phone, you know, unless you’re really acting on it, stop checking email on your phone. Same applies to social media and the opposite way, you know, only use your phone for social media. So that way, most phones right now, okay, can track what you have the problem he says you said when you go now multiplied from your spent half an hour here on the phone, half an hour on the tablet, two hours on the computer, to 30 more minutes on the phone. One way to start measuring that in a better way. Speaker device doesn’t matter which one can be the computer can be the tablet can be the phone is irrelevant, big device as your social media device. Because then at the end of the week, then you can go and look how much time you spend into that application. So sometimes, to get that information, what we need is to limit the device that we are accessing old days, then make an effective, Hey, you know what, only access Twitter on my phone is blocked out of every other device, then at the end of the week, I know while I spend 22 hours in Twitter this week, well, I have an issue, okay, but that’s a way to corral that problem and measure and improve the measurements. The problem is we wish to be to self regulate ourselves without giving us the tools to really self regulate ourselves. So we are hoping that we can access to thin Unlimited, but we are only going to eat you know i small played well. You know, if I throw most people in in a boo fed all you can eat style, okay, the probability is that you’re just going to eat a small plate of veggies is slim to none. It’s not different when I allows you are when you allow yourself to access social media and every device that you have on every moment of the day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:56
And again, I’m going to I’m going to give this from a little the different of a perspective in terms of just the way in which I see and interact with social media myself, I, I always believe that you need to limit the number of social networks you use, personally, professionally, or otherwise. And I differ I suppose from a goose toe in the sense that I do believe that I have, I have social networks that I only use personally with different profiles, and I have those that I use professionally. And with different profiles, obviously. And so those are almost completely independent, I very rarely cross over my engagement with my clients, for example, or my target audience, as a business owner, with my personal profiles. As a private citizen, I try to just keep those all in all separated. And that doesn’t mean that you have to, a lot of people don’t. But I just feel this, feel this, you know, I’m a fairly private person, I like my private life private. And so I keep that separate, for example, people who want to, I get this all the time, and I apologize to those of you who are listening who have tried this to, to friend me on Facebook, but I’m not accepting Facebook friend requests.

I’m just not friends with people outside of my family and very, very close, you know, people who are very close to me, and so I try to keep that space very, very limited, I will interact and engage with people on Twitter, and I will interact and engage people through my website and through other community platforms. But that kind of intimate space is intimate for a reason. And so Facebook is just not that for me. And I know it’s different for everybody. And I think that’s part of the problem is that some people will accept every friend requests they get on Facebook, and I just don’t and, and that, by itself has given me a quite a quite a nice form of protection, that I don’t feel, I don’t feel attacked, or I don’t feel a lot of the problems I think a lot of other people feel on Facebook. Even though it’s not my preferred social network, I still feel like I can engage with my mom and dad, I can engage with my my brothers and sisters and my extended family there and some of my close friends from from various, you know, academic backgrounds, and not feel bombarded by overload of information. One other thing that I would I would recommend is the use of a tool, if you’re doing any level of professional work on social media is using a tool such as Hootsuite, or buffer to manage and schedule posts. And that allows you to be able to disconnect professionally from social media. And and then your professional use of social media is, is time bound, you’re in essence, either time blocking or Chungking. Your use of social media for work doing that stuff when you need to. And then in a concentrated period, and then separating from it so that if you don’t really use social media personally, you you don’t have to feel tugged back and forth. And if you do use it personally, then you know that when you’re not in one of those tools, you are explicitly engaging in personal social media use, I always recommend to everybody that first you track how much time you’re spending on social media, as a booster said, there are really great tools out there on mobile, you know, on on iOS and Android, there are now these well being tracking functionalities that that tell you how much you’re using your phone and what particular apps you’re using this instant, and there’s gyroscope and many other applications that can track those. And you can then see, am I do you feel I mean, this is really your preferential but do you feel you’re spending too much unproductive time, and can’t necessarily control yourself to do so because it’s, it’s all addictive, you know, I’m not going to couch it any other way. But those platforms are designed to be addictive. So then what do you do about that either use an app blocking tool, you can use a tool like freedom or cold turkey or rescue time to be able to limit your time in those social networks. Or you can create other kinds of social accountability. You know, you can tell family members, if you see me on Instagram, you know, let me know. And that way I can start to engage myself in in better behaviors. So that’s how I really see a more efficient and effective use of social media is tracking your time and ultimately deciding whether or not that time is being used productively and separating your social media use professionally and personally. So that you’re better able to have some level of compartmentalization as to what is your your professional usage? And what’s your personal usage? And that way you’re tying, tying that to work? And or if you’re a business owner tying that to revenue driving. And the other side is your personal decisions on what you’re going to use social media for leaving today’s episode as we close out the conversation. What is one actionable idea for our listeners,

Augusto Pinaud 39:23
I always had five people, some people joke and say says yeah, say say that’s us, you do not as you saying that as you do, but limit which devices you do what? Okay, yeah, I understand I carry with me many devices, but that’s a recent I carry many devices, because they are really a specific. So think about this, if you feel that you can do better on the social media world will look at which devices you are accessing social media, and then limited, okay, it’s not that you’re going to access less is that you are going to be able to access that in a more efficient way. So that will be really, really helpful for you. That will be my my action of the day,

Francis Wade 40:10
I would recommend that they set a target number of hours social media week of PR news per week. And then just as a boost to the same track it against the target. Are you meeting your expectations.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:24
And my actionable item is to choose one primary social network as your home base. One thing that I feel like many people do is that they try to be on all of the various social networks that all of their disparate social groups are on. And in reality that provides you with a diminishing rate of return. Because three friends are on this network and three friends are on that network and five friends are on another. And at some point, you need to concentrate your resources that is your time and attention and other resources to one primary social network and just use that as your home base. And, and yes, are you going to miss out on some conversations? Sure. But if it’s important enough, just like the cream will rise to the top. If you if if someone wants you to pay a bill, and you missed the first letter, and they want you to pay it, they’re going to send another bill right, they’re going to send a follow up or you know another notice. That’s the kind of the same situation with regard to all these conversations that are happening, people have this, this tendency to feel like oh my gosh, I’m going to miss miss out on something they have fo mo fear of missing out. Well, the reality is, is that you’ll live. So choose one social network, and that that could be one social network for personal use, and one social network for professional use, you know, one for your business life, and the one for your business life is going to be where the majority of your target audience where your target market exists. But in your personal world, it’s going to be where maybe the majority of the people you care about are or where you are most comfortable. I mean, really, this really depends upon you and choose that one primary social network is home base. And then the others you could you could, you know, disregard, you can check less frequently, whatever it is, but really focus on one, and then using a good citizen Francis’s mechanisms for choosing devices strategically and setting target numbers of hours for social media use, and then you have a better control and handle on effective and efficient use of those of those networks. So thank you, gentlemen, this closes out our conversation for this productivity cast. And so a couple of things before we close out one, if you have a question or comment about this cast, or something we discussed here on the episode, you’re, you’re welcome to click on the Contact button. If you’re listening to us from the podcast website at productivity cast net, feel free to click on the Contact button, you’ll send a message to us we’ll be happy to communicate with you back if you need to. If you are listening to us through the podcast app, then head on over to productivity cast.net and go ahead and click on the Contact button. You can also visit the contact of the episode page. And there on the episode page, you’ll see a comment section you can feel feel free to leave a comment will get a notification and be glad to respond to you there as well. on productivity cast net. On the episode page, you’ll find our show notes, links to anything we talked about. I know I mentioned a few apps as we made our way through the episode. So you can find links to all of those things that we discussed there in the show notes, there’s transcript, and you can learn how to subscribe to the podcast if you are already not a subscriber. And so there we go. If you could please visit iTunes or Stitcher where you can leave a rating or review and that helps us one feel good about what we’re doing because you know we’re spending time and energy to to talk to you and we just like like to hear from you. And the other is it helps us grow our personal productivity community. And so as you rate and review us the algorithm God’s let the podcast directories know to show us to more of the listening community. So thank you for doing that. Thank you to use Joe and Francis for joining me here on today’s cast. And that brings us to the close of the episode of productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity, take care and here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 44:33
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.