Guest
How much do time do you spend on social media? How many hours a week does Facebook take from you? How often do you pause to tweet, to post a photo, even to send a group text?
Yes, you enjoy it.
Yes, there is networking to be done.
Yes, Twitter is part of the fabric of your life…we all get it.
But as those hours get sucked away there are things that need to get done, things you are putting off: It could be that novel you are writing, right? Or that report that’s due on Friday. Or this blog post – the one you are reading now – the one that I put off a few times, and you’ve found thanks to social media (don’t feel guilty, this counts as research.) Social media – or “Social Sharing” is addictive because it’s so useful – so easy to adopt. But like any opiate, it steals from our personal productivity, and in the aggregate it steals from humanity’s productivity as well – deep down you know the millions of hours spent on FarmVille could be used to cure the disease of your choice.
Okay, you can argue that most of the folks who sit and while away the hours on social media wouldn’t be doing much anyway, and it’s better to keep some of them occupied instead of stirring up trouble – but that’s another essay.
Let’s be idealists here – and cite an artificial statistic (I know, damn lies and all.) “When Twitter goes down, worker productivity skyrockets 50%.”
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James Sposto is a film maker, designer, entrepreneur, co-founder of digital creative agency Sposto Interactive and the co-founder of Xtrant, the official project management startup for everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference.