Creating Time and Sparking Writing Ideas
After checking my email and prioritizing replies, mornings typically involve a tour through internet-land, with brief stops at Google+ or Twitter or LinkedIn. Yes, OR. Each fills a well-defined need, and not very well, I would say. Filtering through the data is a time-suck and the current solutions to this, personalized search results, can’t read my mind or predict what I want. Sometimes even I can’t!
To minimize lost time on needless internet things and to maximize the life balance I seek in my career and my life, where time is precious and writing, reading, editing, and research dominates my day (as does fulfilling the need for daily daily sunshine and in-person face-time), I have begun to regulate my social network internet use based on a five-day work week. This means I might peek at all three, but only one on any given day gets to suck me in.
This morning was Google+ time, with a little bit of uncircling due to a spontaneous Add Circle moment weeks ago, when over a hundred users I didn’t know became part of my Google+ network. As a result, in an effort to open my network, I lost time blocking and muting a lot of posts and people. To make Google+ relevant and even enjoyable, I need to be selfish (versus obsequious) and carefully curate my circle members. To that effect, just because someone adds me or is already in my circle can no longer be reason enough to join or remain in my network.
Yes, I am advocating you go against the tide of expanding your network to selecting each new person based on very personal and particular goals. Being an early adopter of social networks (hello MySpace) and choosing to skip the Facebook fervour, I learned an important lesson about time management and social networks: more of the former, less of the latter because there is always going to be more content, but not more time. Less is more, even if this mantra goes against general opinion.
Popular opinion is to keep all doors open because you just never know, you know? Uncircling, unfollowing, these acts are problematic in that others may perceive it as an act of personal war, if the uncircled or unfollowed is a tad sensitive. So be it. We all want to be friendly, nice, and fair, but at what cost?
As a writer, an editor, a person who needs to frequently prospect for new work opportunities or readers, this move seems risky. Will I lose potential future readers because there was that one person long ago who I uncircled, not knowing they could influence my career at a critical point? Will I narrow my prospects and damage my career?
I doubt it. This kind of worry or thinking is symptomatic of a particular disease, one that touches many in all kinds of careers. It’s fear: of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, offending the wrong person. It’s also a forgetting, that no one can please everyone so it’s a waste of time to try (unless your job description calls for it; I’ve decided mine doesn’t).
Writers, as we know, can be a particularly neurotic bunch, susceptible to incredible insecurities. For that reason, writers need to learn how to accept that others’ feelings and perceptions cannot be controlled. They can’t. We are each free agents living in a world of diverse ideas, tastes, and knowledge. Accepting this is a fundamental, preparatory lesson for dealing with unavoidable rejection when soliciting agents or publishers and then the sometimes harsh criticism that can follow public exposure without feeling as if the soul has shattered. Writers, however and to their detriment, often imagine that writing is precisely about controlling a reader’s experience. Depends on your personal philosophy about what writing is meant to do. I like to think the good writers look to open up readers’ experiences by inviting them into a newly created world of ideas and stories.
In writing, and in social networking, you can’t please everyone, so go uncircle and unfollow, and write with all your heart about the things you believe in without believing others will or must get it as you do.
There was a certain creative freedom that resulted when I decided to trust my instincts and do what I needed regardless of popular or expert opinion. I didn’t even realize how I was slipping into the mode of popular thinking that is often the internet (popular gets conflated with expert), subjecting myself to its norms without too much thought, because my thinking was rundown by information overload.
I think it’s come to a point where everyone needs an individual personal mission statement for how technology is included in one’s life. I’m formulating mine to accommodate frequency and quality of use, because increased quality of content means the time I use is more efficient. Quality can mean many things. For example, I’ll uncircle you if you lack civility or humility when commenting, because I value civil discourse and people who recognize errors and can take feedback without going immediately on the defensive. I’ll also uncircle you if the content proves over time to be recycled and repetitive.
With a beginning strategy to manage internet-land time, I am less distracted, better informed, and less stressed about writing. And, now that I am streamlining my circles, the possibility of finding wonderful content during my Google+ time is increasing. This morning I was thrilled to discover an infographic on beginning strategies for sparking blog writing ideas.
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