Does Your Online Socializing Interrupt Your Productivity

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, who spend much of their time online, you’ll probably notice you spend a disproportionate amount of time checking Facebook, Twitter, your email or your web stats. How much productivity does this really cost you? And how can you cut down on this productivity loss?

The True Price of Socializing

If you check your Facebook for just five minutes, two or three times a day, plus your email another two or three times a day, that doesn’t seem like much, does it? It seems like very normal online behavior in fact.

In reality, the costs are huge.

Let’s say each time you decide to check Facebook, it interrupts your concentration and costs you momentum in a project. In addition, it takes you an additional ten minutes or so to get back “in the groove.”

While you’re on Facebook, you might see a cool link or video. Or perhaps a slightly political comment on a friend’s wall that you want to discuss. You get sidetracked and spend an additional five or ten minutes.

When you add it all up, each distraction could easily cost you fifteen to thirty minutes of productivity.

Did you know that you can really just check your email once at the beginning of your work day and once at the end and still address all the important emails in a very reasonable time frame?

Did you also know that, even with 1,000 friends, you can easily view all the posts that were posted in a day in about twenty minutes – checking Facebook just once a day?

The cuts in productivity aren’t necessary. You aren’t missing out on anything by streamlining your online social networking.

What to Do about It

As mentioned above, one very effective system is to just check your email or Facebook once at the beginning of the workday and/or at the end of the workday.

If the interruptions feel like an addition (it does for many), consider getting a site blocker for a short period of time.

Even if it’s just for two weeks, it can help you get in the habit. Set up the site blocker so Facebook.com, Gmail.com, Twitter.com, etc. aren’t accessible during work hours. That way you won’t even be tempted to access those sites.

Also consider trying a productivity monitoring system. These are systems that will actually watch how much time you spend on email, on work and on sites like Facebook and report it to you at the end of the day. You’ll probably be shocked at how much time social networking really takes when you see the numbers.

You now know how much online social networking can really be costing you in terms of productivity. You also know a number of ways to break this habit. Remember: adding just an hour or two to your daily productivity can mean a lot of real money added to your bottom line in a few months’ time.