The NY Times reports that some teenagers are coming to grips with how much time they're choosing to spend on Facebook.
“We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said.
By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.
The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.
Merlin Mann is writing a new book and he's been posting some videos discussing his ideas. What he came up with in a recent video is a roundhouse kick of solid advice for anyone who's into productivity and self-help reading. Here's his 43 Folders post with the supporting info.
After watching this video, I've intentionally relegated most of my Twitter & RSS subscriptions to a category called "nachos" that is not loaded by default. That will make sense after watching. A couple warnings, 1) it's really long and 2) the opener is juvenile and crude with a couple profanities later, so I'd recommend skipping to 2:00. He attacks from so many good angles, but the main thesis is that too many people are fooling themselves into believing they are building competence by reading advice blogs, when their real need is to just decide who they are and do something to become a real expert. I took an inexact transcript of some of the important takeaways:
There are a lot of people in the world, in a lot of different professions, but particularly on the Internet... there are a lot of people who don't start making money until you briefly forget who you are. Procrastination and anxiety about work and the stuff we know we need to do comes from a lack of confidence about one of three things:
We temporarily forget who we are and who we want to be and who we want to be
What we should be paying attention to
What our options are and what we can do about it
The downside of tacitly asking the world to tell you who you are is that there are a lot of things, people, Internet properties, and businesses that thrive on finding people who don't know who they are and then telling them over and over and over again who they could be, what they could pay attention to, and what they could do about it as a result. Some people make a living by repeatedly getting you to not do your work.Don't imagine that you're building expertise if what you're really doing is just kind of unwinding. Ask yourself, What are you going to do with that? How is that helping you figure out who you are today, what you need to pay attention to, and what you might do about it? How will you know when you're done and when the question is satisfactorily answered? No system, no diagram is going to save you. It's heroin. You're going to have to figure out who you are.
John Nese loves soda pop. I mean, he REALLY loves soda pop. He’s dedicated his life to the bubbly beverages. Nese owns Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles. He sells more than 500 varieties of soda pop.
This guy knows who he is. That's why he turned down a low price to carry Pepsi. Watch the video and you'll find a smile and some inspiration. (ht: Seth Godin)
What becomes even more dizzying is the thousands of professionals that have career-related blogs that attract companies in the first place. Who owns their blog posts during their tenure at a company? If an employee generated revenue from those blog posts should the revenue go back to the employer? What if a career blog is launched during employment at a company and discusses information related to the company, or a LinkedIn profile during employment, who owns them?
It was a standard question in our hiring process, but the job candidate
visibly stiffened and said, "A bit, I guess. But not every day. And only after
work. I mean, never at work. I mean, never on my work computer."
And that was a standard response. I let her off the hook. "I'm not asking
because I'm worried about you wasting time," I said. "I'm asking because we like
to hire people who enjoy using social media tools."
Alexandra Samuel shares some great starting points for developing the right attitude and educational effort around your organization's use of social media.
Your industry has been completely and permanently altered by the connections offered by the internet. Your non-profit, your political campaign, your service business. Not a little different, not just email enabled or website marketed, but overhauled.
James Watters cites this video of Robert Cialdini to make the point that,
Being out of step with a group causes us literal physical pain on a small scale. The bigger the social burden in explaining our creative ideas, the less likely we are to pursue them. What’s that mr MBA? You didn’t have that as a project cost on your spread-sheet? Exactly.
Dan Pink makes the case that the 20th century concepts of management and employee motivation have been proven ineffective for tasks that require creativity and decision-making in the face of even slight uncertainty. Instead, he says that effective work environments need to focus on converging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
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