Social Media: Time-Waster or Productivity Booster?
(photo credit: bump, flickr)
If you’ve ever worked a 9-to-5, you’re probably among millions of bored workers who have done some covert web-browsing (or not-so-covert web-browsing, as seen above), possibly tweeting about how terribly you want to gouge your eyes out because your boss just gave you two last-minute assignments to finish today, and of course, it’s Friday.
While most bosses would cringe at the sight of their loyal workers “wasting precious time” browsing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Brendan I. Koerner’s article in the March issue of Wired points out that a little social media on the job may not be such a terrible thing:
“Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking”
Indeed, time away from focused tasks does seem important. Of course, as Koerner points out later in the article, not just any goofing off will do. Rather than turning your break time towards complete time-wasters that offer zero intellectual or creative value (addictinggames.com is a black hole for productivity for many), work breaks are actually useful if they involve exposure to new ideas. On social media sites that offer micro-blogging, such as Facebook and Twitter, these new ideas come en masse, whether it be in the form of a tweet from NeuroNow about the latest neuroscience news, or a humorous Facebook status update about your old college buddy’s weekend dalliances.
For me, this is an extremely useful tool, and I think it can be for virtually anyone if used properly. I have essentially set-up Twitter as my personalized newspaper—I choose the authors, who constantly feed me new, up-to-the-minute headlines. I have found Facebook to be a little less useful than Twitter for this purpose (likely just the nature of how I have set-up each site), but even a random status update about a friend’s thoughts on her latest TV craze can hold some value. In the end, whether serious and intellectual, or humorous and lighthearted, you really never know what another person’s experience might inspire in your own mind.
Overall, I that think using social media as a means towards productivity is increasingly important in a world where so many media outlets are shouting about the same old uninspiring nonsense. In social media, however, you get the voices and viewpoints of actual people, not some uniform, streamlined sense of reality offered up by corporate media.
More importantly, new exposure leads to new ideas, and social media is ultimate exposure, hitting you with new bits of information multiple times per minute. As new ideas pile up in your mind, new connections will be made, and while some connections will be destined to go nowhere, still others will lead to fruitful futures.
