5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive

Have you every started your day with that focused attitude: " I'm going to find a job today". But I just want to quickly check my email , tweets, Linkedin and Facebook. Then you look up and the Sun is about to set. LOL. Then you should take a few minutes and read this article. (Editor's Note)

5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive

Scott Belsky studies exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world. He is the Founder and CEO of Behance oversees The 99% think tank, and is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality (Portfolio, April 2010).

Those of us who are social media-savvy suffer from a burgeoning problem that constantly threatens our ingenuity. If we fail to acknowledge and solve this problem, our brilliant ideas may may never see the light of day.
Every single minute, more “stuff” is being sent your way. E-mails, text messages, voice mails, instant messages, Twitter messages, Facebookposts… and the list goes on. The proliferation of mobile devices only increases the flow.

What do you do with this deluge? You simply try to stay afloat. You peck away at the latest communications at the top of your many inboxes. And since the flow of information never ends, you risk slipping into a life of what I have come to call “reactionary workflow.”
For those of us with great ideas and bold goals for the future, reactionary workflow is a big problem. If we spend all day reacting to the incoming barrage of communication, we will fail to be proactive with our energy. Our long-term aspirations suffer as a result.


For the past five years, I’ve been interviewing super-productive leaders and teams — people at companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney, and individuals like author Chris Anderson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I’ve never asked them how they come up with ideas. I’m not interested. My fascination is how they make their ideas happen, time and time again.
Many of the people I met have developed ways to combat reactionary workflow. Here are a few tips on how they do it.

1. Create Windows of Non-Stimulation

Once you open the door to communications overload, you could spend all day reacting to what’s thrown at you. Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of the marketing consultancy PSFK, reserves a good chunk of his morning –- from 7 to 10 a.m. every day -– to do research and digest the day’s trends and news prior to going through his e-mail. Proactively blocking out time for creating and absorbing, rather than just responding, is a key tactic of productive creatives.

2. Keep Two Lists:

When it comes to organizing the day’s tasks — and how your energy will be allocated — create two lists: One for urgent items and another for important ones. Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete against the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve distinctly different periods of time for focus on each.

3. Schedule Focused Periods of Processing Every Day:

During the research for my book, I met a number of people who swear by “power hours.” These individuals would try to compress all response-related work into pre-determined short periods of time every day, usually one to two hours of uninterrupted inbox clearing. The notion of compartmentalizing reactionary workflow was a theme across the most productive leaders I met.

4. Don’t Hoard Urgent Items:

Even when you delegate operational responsibilities to someone else, you may still find you are hoarding urgent items as they arise. When you care so deeply about a project, you likely prefer to resolve things yourself.
Say an e-mail arrives from a client with a routine problem. Even though the responsibility may lie with someone else on your team, you might think, “Oh, this is a really quick fix, I’ll just take care of it.” And gradually your energy will start to shift away from long-term pursuits. Hoarding urgent items is one of the most damaging tendencies I’ve noticed in creative professionals that have experienced early success. When you are in the position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items to others.

Read the full article at Mashable