Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. All these social media communities can be immensely useful (and immensely fun), but they can also be a giant time suck. So how can you be smart about your social media world, maximizing the benefit you get out of staying connected and ensuring all those feeds and alerts don’t encroach too far into your offline time?
Make social network activity come to you. Pick your primary channel of communication and route all your notifications from various services to come through it. For example, you check your email every day. Most every service can send you email alerts when you receive a message or get a new follower or comment. You can funnel Facebook messages, Flickr photo comments, Twitter direct messages, and LinkedIn questions all to your email inbox. (Don’t forget: if email alerts come too often, change your settings to reduce the volume.)
Interact with multiple services from a single interface. If some of your friends use Facebook and others use Twitter and others update their own blog, keep up with all those news streams in a single place like your RSS reader, or a tool like TweetDeck or FriendFeed. You can maximize your time even more and broadcast updates to multiple services in one shot. From TweetDeck or Digsby, for example, you can post a status update to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time.
Split up your social media accounts for personal and business purposes. You don’t want your boss to see that you’re tweeting from the beach on a sick day, and you don’t want your mom to read about the hot date you had last night. Designate different accounts for different purposes and configure your privacy settings accordingly.
If you’re out of work and your savings are bleeding away, taking a temporary gig may seem like a financial reprieve and a good first step towards getting your mojo back. But that temp job might also have unexpected repercussions. While many might not be in a financial position to take heed, a study out of MIT suggests taking a temporary position may take a bite out of your long-term earnings, Time’s Curious Capitalist blog reports. Read the rest of this entry »
According to the NY Times hiring is on the increase in one area at least: low-paid or unpaid internships. As a card carrying Gen Y myself, I didn’t need the newspaper to tell me that. Any recent graduate can attest to the omnipresence of the internship and exactly how unavoidable a rite of passage multiple unpaid stints at various organizations seems to be. The unpaid internship is a reality yes, but is it fair? Read the rest of this entry »
Often dissatisfaction at work is just burn-out and can be fixed by adjusting your mentality or taking a decent vacation, but sometimes there’s something wrong that’s more fundamental — you’re in the wrong role, wrong industry or wrong career path entirely. Telling one from the other can be tricky, however, especially for those who are new to the workplace and unsure what is a normal level of malaise.
In his State of the Union address last week President Obama told America that “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.” But will the US be that nation? Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re stuck on a tricky problem and can’t find a way through the mental block, the solution may be in re-examining your assumptions. Think you don’t have any? Derek Sivers begs to differ.
In this three-minute mind opener of a TED presentation, music marketer (speaking of problems in need of a radical paradigm shift) Sivers attempts to shake up his audience’s thinking and demonstrate that even our simplest understandings often rest on unexamined assumptions, and that other cultures view these same day-to-day issues quite differently. If seemingly obvious things like assigning addresses depend on fundamental conceptualizations we’re usually not aware of, imagine how many unexamined assumptions underlie your difficult business problems? That’s a lot of opportunities to blow past your mental block.
You’re a relatively junior member of your office team, so when an Outlook invite comes in for a meeting called by someone higher up the food chain you dutifully reply that you’ll attend. But when you’re actually in the room it quickly becomes clear that the whole event is a waste of time. Maybe no one is prepared, maybe the facilitator lacks the necessary skills to get things going, or maybe the decision maker is feeling squeamish about making a call, but through no fault of your own the meeting is going nowhere fast.
Pretty much everyone agrees that finding a good mentor is a key part of career advancement for young workers, but is the simple act of lassoing a more experienced guide to the corporate world enough? No, says Meghna Majmudar, writing on the blog of author Keith Ferrazzi recently. A good mentor-mentee relationship is not solely the responsibility of the more senior member of the pair. The younger member can do a lot to make sure the partnership is fruitful. Read the rest of this entry »
Even if you’re fresh on the office scene, it doesn’t take long for many of us to conclude that our co-workers are weirdos. From annoying habits to odd emotional outbursts, colleagues’ strange behavior is enough to leave many wondering where on earth these oddballs come from. If you’re one of those baffled by the crazy characters you work with every day, take heart — at least you’ve got company. You might feel alone in the crowd at work but you’re not alone in your alienation.
Last summer, when the economy was wallowing at the bottom of the worst recession in decades, the National Association of Colleges and Employers asked nearly 15,000 American students where they wanted to work after graduation. In the face of a brutal job market, did they rush toward safe-sounding traditional sectors like law or accounting? No. Nearly a third hoped to find work in a non-profit, up five percentage points from 2008.
According to experts, the survey results are further evidence that the generation graduating now is notably socially conscious and keen for their careers to mean something beyond a regular pay check. But is this doable in the real world — or for those with business, rather than social science, experience? Read the rest of this entry »
Jessica Stillman
Jessica is an alumnus of the BNET editorial intern program, which taught her everything she knows about blogging. She now lives in London where she works as a freelance writer with interests in green business and tech, management and marketing. more »
The most important breakthrough Apple's much ballyhooed iPad tablet can make is to jump start the digital economy by providing an iTunes-like payment platform and iPhone Apps functionality in a new multimedia sandbox where everyone can play and make money.
The new extension of the home-buyer tax credit gives buyers more time and more opportunity to take advantage. Income limits have changed, for instance, and you no longer have to be a first-time home buyer. Here’s how to grab the newly expanded tax break.
Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. All these social media communities can be immensely useful (and immensely fun), but they can also be a giant time suck. So how can you be smart about your social media world, maximizing the benefit you get out of staying connected and ensuring all those feeds and alerts don’t encroach too far into your offline time?
