Social Media is ubiquitous today. Almost every mobile or Web-based app we use has social technologies built in—like buttons and emojis, commenting, rating and review systems, and the ability to connect, share and collaborate with others. While these features have made social media technology companies billions of dollars, they have also created some deleterious effects on humanity at large. How should we consider social media in the context of our personal productivity? And, what can we do so that we are using social media productively? That’s the discussion topic on this week’s ProductivityCast.
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In this Cast | Using Social Media Productively
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Using Social Media Productively
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Yammer
Word Replacer II (Chrome extension)
Hootsuite
Buffer
Instant app
Gyroscope
Android’s Digital Wellbeing
Screen Time on iOS
Freedom
Cold Turkey
RescueTime
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:20 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 Welcome, gentlemen to productivitycast. Welcome to our listeners. For today's episode, I'm just going to get right into it. Today's episode is actually a jam packed episode where we're going to talk about social media and how to use it productively. And the conversation is going to be divided into three parts, we're going to talk about whether or not social media is doing harm to personal productivity writ large. And then we're going to move the conversation into some of the pros and cons of social media as it relates to PR productivity. And then finally, we're going to have a conversation about what can we all do with our use of social media in our productive lives. And so I'd like us to just really kick it right off with agree or disagree. Social media is doing more harm than good. for personal productivity.
Augusto Pinaud 1:22
I think I agree on that statement, you know, it is one of the problem with social media is that we take for us truth, a 40 and 140 characters statement, okay, doesn't matter, the length is statement. But the fact is, you find two or three people and say, Oh, if so and so said that that needs to be truth. And we stop the research and process that in personal productivity is important. personal productivity is not a cookie cutter, you know, he's not every site, every size fits everybody, I'm not every solution. It's good for everybody. But when you just take it for granted, or whatever he said, what happened is you stop analyzing the positive that can or cannot be half what the impact that certain solution or certain thing could have on your own system and on your own life, that produce people changing more often that needed that produce as a result or less effective
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:30
productivity. So your argument is that people need to maybe take a step back from the social media world and take stock of what they're doing. And strategically using social media
Augusto Pinaud 2:45
people these use in social media as a research tool, and it's never was never intended for that. So the problem is, you go into the link, and then you go into the rabbit holes, but never get anywhere,
Francis Wade 2:57
I think it's the sum of our experiences proven that they are very powerful tools. They do very sort of amazing things that could not be done in any other way. There's no way to accomplish being connected with so many people. So efficiently. However, I think that we, we've pretty much gone into the use of social media, with our eyes closed, kind of just blindly trusting whichever one we happen to be using. And the creators of the different apps and the different sites are, have become aware, skillful at sort of maintaining our attention. And we've just been a guest, like guinea pigs, rabbits, just kind of following along pretty blindly. I think we're sort of waking up to the fact that not all the behaviors that we're engaging in are beneficial to us that only engaging in social media has a a huge downside. And I think it's more a case of it's very powerful, there's huge benefits, there are also huge downsides. And we're just sort of waking up to the downsides and asking ourselves, is this worth it? I think net net, it is worth it. Because the fact that we're abusing the tools are not using them well doesn't mean that they can't be used well, and they can't keep giving us the benefits that we want. I think it's a matter of awareness. And sort of understanding that the the by the creators of social media we are they want to lure us into a particular kind of behavior or habit. And we need to be aware of that. And regardless of their inducements, sort of choose the ones that work for us, the ones that are most productive. In other words,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:50
I'm in I'm on the side that yes, social media is doing harm in some way, shape, or form, but probably not more then good. From a personal productivity perspective, on the on the end mass as a whole to the to people, you know, in general, I do believe that social media can be used poorly. And I think that's what you're speaking to both Cousteau and Francis is that there is a, a ripe opportunity here for people to be able to use social media in positive ways. But because it's addictive, and that really comes down to the way in which the software is designed. It's designed to be addictive, that we then get time mismanagement, because social media success into things that we maybe should not be paying attention to, that we should not be attending to content that doesn't apply to us doesn't matter in the greater perspective in life. And what that ultimately means is that people are set lower boundaries for what is quality, and what's worth bringing into their focus. And I think that's the that's the real problem is that we are now raising a set of of our, you know, people are young people are being raised in such a way that they are not learning how to differentiate the latest and loudest as David Allen would say, from the quality, slow, deep, thoughtful, intense, conversational modality that's required for us to have creative thoughts and do the pattern recognition, and to have reflection, and to have silence and to navigate emotional regulation as it relates to boredom and other kinds of uncomfortable feelings. Not in a fast paced, fury driven world. And I think I think because of that, it creates some productive downstream problems. And I'd like to discuss some of those now, which are, what do you believe are, are ultimately the pros and cons of social media, social media itself, sits on top of a wide variety of social technologies. And so that listeners have an understanding, as I teach social media in a small business context, I'm constantly forced to teach people that there are 30, plus different types of social technologies from the wiki, which is the software that runs large sites like Wikipedia, to a blog, a blog is a form of social media, it's a it's a post that other people are capable of, of engaging with. So if you look at the term social, social, meaning that many people can collaborate and engage on that piece of content, the media doesn't really particularly matter. It could be audio, it could be video, it could be text, it could be pictures. All of those are types of media, we tend to focus on Facebook, and social networks, that is external social networks. And so external social networks, Facebook, internal social networks would be something akin to a Facebook group, where you have this internal group of people within the larger social network, or the larger external social network. And so all of these types of media are and can be socialized. It just ultimately ends up being what is good about them. And what's bad about them is the way in which we use them potentially, and or the way in which they're designed. That is the way in which the developers are moving users in a particular dimension.
Francis Wade 8:48
Recently, I start I, I sort of engaged in the process of setting up a community, which has all the words a formal social media. So I had to think through the behaviors that I would like my community members to engage in, because I'm sort of starting from scratch. And I've learned that the behaviors I want them to engage in once they jumped with first to join, once they join,
