Why Less is Not Always More With Social Media Productivity

This is a guest post by the very fine Chris Garret, @chrisgarrett.

There are some very good examples of less being more, in design, productivity, and so on. When it comes to social media though, this is not necessarily the case.

I keep hearing the following advice

• Schedule your tweets to go out automatically so you do not spend too much time in social media
• Only follow a few people so you do not get information overload
• Limit your interactions to only “key players”
• Hook up your blog to your social accounts so you do not have to manually post links
• Have a maximum of five minutes a day set aside for social media

… and so on.

With due balance and context, some of this is good advice. Some is sourced from good advice but taken to illogical extremes (eg. only five minutes a day?).

The problem with blanket advice is there is no connection to you, your goals, or your overall strategy.

First you have to answer WHY you are getting involved in social media.

Then you have to work out a strategy that works toward that goal.

Limiting yourself and your social media interactions to an arbitrary time figure is like saying you will only use the telephone for five minutes a day just in case you get into wasteful conversations. “Sorry Mr Customer, I have to hang up now as I have gone past my five minutes for the day”. You wouldn’t do that, so why are people happily doing it with social media?

Track progress towards what you want to achieve, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Most of all … Do what works for YOU.

About the author: Chris Garrett is a new media commentator and internet marketing coach living in the UK. You can find him regularly guest posting at blogs such as this one, or writing for clients such as Cogniview and his own blog at chrisg.com.

Solving The Wrong Problem

One of my oldest memories as a child is cleaning the house. I remember clearly how I started to use a broom – which seemed like a giant toy – and how I slowly gathered together piles of dust from all areas of our small apartment. It was something new and exciting. Although I was a kid (not older than 3, I guess), I know I wasn’t playing, because I had the task to take out all the dirt from the floor. I used the broom as a tool to get out all the dirt and did it consciously. At some moment, all the piles I gathered with my broom were loaded into a trash bin. I clearly remember how good I felt after the whole action. I eliminated the dirt. Did something by myself.

Fast forward 35 years: I’m writing a blog entry about one of the most subtle, yet incredibly important setbacks in our lives: inverse evaluation. The name sounds strange, but behind this name lies one of the most popular approaches in our world. It can be found at any age, in any culture, at any education level. It makes more bad than smoking and it’s more popular than drinking. Many people still consider it like something normal, although is one of the worst thing you can do to yourself. It’s the evaluation of things by the opposite of what you want to happen. Or, to be shorter: inverse evaluation.

It’s The Other Way Around

The best way to explain it is to analyze my first memory described above. As a kid, I felt this huge satisfaction when I took out the dirt from the floor. I finished a task and the result was great. I felt so good, that I was eager to repeat it instantly. Only there wasn’t anymore dirt in the house. I had to wait for a while until I was able to do the trick again. But when I did it, I had the same satisfaction. To be honest, the satisfaction was even bigger.

Now, suppose you’re trying to lose weight. You have something like 10 kilos over your normal weight. You start to exercise, control your eating habits, get slow on your sugar, and so on. In 3 months, you’re out of 10 kilos. Wow! What an accomplishment! You lost 10 kilos!

You run your own business. At some point, you want to cut some costs in order to streamline a little your cashflow. With a little bit of attention, you’re able to cut 5000$ from your expenses. Wow! Can you imagine that? I just cut 5000$ in expenses from my own business! Am I good or what?

Started to understand where I’m heading? Not yet? Then read on.

You don’t want a bigger pile of dirt, you just want your house to be clean.
You don’t want to lose 15 kilos next time, you just want to keep your weight at a normal level.
You don’t want to cut 7000$ nest time from your business expenses, you just want to naturally grow and maintain your business.

That’s inverse evaluation. You measure things by their opposite.

The real goal is to have a clean house, not to produce (and happily eliminate) more and more dirt. The real goal is to be healthy all the time, not to lose more kilos every few months (after you worked hard to put them on you, of course). The real goal is to provide value through your business, not to measure your success by your economies.

It’s the other way around. And still, we don’t get it.

Shift Your Course

Measuring things by their opposite is very dangerous. It’s tricky because is closer to us than the real stuff. This inverse evaluation is easier to understand because it’s measurable. It’s easy to understand that single atomic action of getting out the dirt from your house every two weeks. It’s so convenient. Every two weeks you get your dose of self-respect and satisfaction. Clean your life. Lost extra weight. You see?

Seeing things as they are is difficult because you’re inclined to get satisfaction from atomic actions. You trained yourself to react to small doses of actions instead of being part of a continuous flow. Keeping a clean house – as opposed to get the dirt out every two weeks – means making small adjustments all the time. You’re doing a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow. You don’t let the dirt to accumulate. In fact, you lose completely the notion of dirt, and you’re only working with the notion of clean. You don’t do single atomic actions. You’re in a continuum of cleanliness.

It’s the same in all other areas: be healthy (instead of focusing on weight), be successful (instead of focusing on money). And it can go all the way up, to the top of your life.

Let’s start another example here: suppose you have a lot of enemies and you decide it’s time to convert them to friends. In abstracto, this is a very healthy choice. It will be really good for your soul and it will win some karma points on the side. So, you start to practice compassion, you start to learn how to apologize and in a very short time you convert several enemies into friends. It feels so good, that you want to do it again. But, surprise: you’re out of enemies! You converted them all! Now what? You start making some new enemies, of course.

The real stuff means not having enemies at all, eliminating the very concept of enemy. Being friendly is the thing, not converting enemies to friends.

Indulging versus Being

Some of you may think already at concepts like polarization or attachment, in its buddhist acceptance. If you do that, good, it means you know where I’m heading. But knowing the concepts is a thing, applying them is another one. For me, one of the easiest way to alleviate my inverse evaluation episodes is to assess if I’m indulging or being.

Ok, let me explain. Indulging means you’re doing something to balance a situation: you come from work, you’re tired, you need some relaxation. Forget about the outside world, have a drink, a chat with your spouse, maybe some sex. Or a dinner out. Or a quick gym session for some endorphins. In a few hours your energies are back to normal. That’s indulging.

Being is different. You’re ok as you are. If you’re tired, that’s ok, you don’t need any reward, nor a miracle medicine for that. Just let the body recover in its own terms. If you’re stressed, let the stress dissolve by itself, don’t apply an antidote. If you’re happy, don’t think at something sad, to “balance” it. Just be happy. Don’t try to balance your current situation for the sake of equilibrium. There is no such thing as equilibrium, you’re moving all the time. If you really want to go to the gym, just go to the gym and feel good about it.

Don’t go because of something, go for something.

Indulging will always call for more and more imbalance in your life. Just being will take your life as it is.

Indulging will always create inverse evaluation: you’ll need more dirt to make your house even cleaner, more fat just to feel better about losing it, more enemies just to have more and more epiphanies of converting them into friends.

Where are you right now? Are you indulging yourself? Or are you just being, with all the good and bad of your life?

System Overload

How many times you’ve started something “without thinking”? How many times you just dived in, thinking that “things will arrange somehow”? How often you embarked on new projects just by passion or enthusiasm, without any type of assessment? I know I did it a lot of times. So often that I was on the verge of completely ditching my assessing and deciding capabilities. I was just doing stuff, imagining that I was carried by “the flow”.

Truth is I was not on the flow. I was completely out of sync. Trying to do so much, but with so little care for my real needs. Just going forward without assessing any of my moves. I remember that every time after a “full” period in my life, something extremely violent happened, usually to my detriment. Every time I was doing “so much” a restraining event came, quite often violently, and drastically restrained my options.

Took me a while to understand this dance of doing too much and then doing too little. But it finally came true: it was just a system overloading situation. The limiting events were in fact there to balance my exaggerated implication in too many projects at once. Some inner positive guardian was activating some switches, telling me: “I’m going to cut the power, Dragos, otherwise, you’re going to blow”.

Overloading Your Life

Whenever you engage in something new you’re overloading your system. Before you’re actually doing something you’ve already put to stress your system: you’re first assessing, and then decide what’s to be done and only after that you really start doing it. That’s the normal sequence. In practice, you’re mainly “doing”, or at least this is what you’re perceiving. Because you put your Assess and Decide stages on auto pilot. And that’s bad.

Even worse, if you’re doing more than it’s useful for you, if you’re taking on your plate more than you can realistically do, you’re going to get some crashes every now and then. It’s like a computer giving you the blue screen of death. Only it will be in the form of a psychological depression, physical illness, or some sort of addiction. Anything that will balance a little the stress you’re putting on your system.

Spontaneity

Just diving in, without too much “thinking”, it’s fantastic from a “spontaneity” perspective. It’s easier to get tricked by this viewpoint and find an excuse for not thinking your moves just for the sake of spontaneity. Although both words are starting with the letter “S” there is a big difference between spontaneity and stupidity. For me, spontaneity means “going with the flow”, stupidity means “going with their flow”.

In other words, spontaneity is a way of reacting to events by following your intuition (which is part of your assessment tools) and engaging in an action which resonates with your values, without giving it the benefit of rational doubt. Sometimes it’s great to go based on a hunch, on an intuition, without thinking too much.

But there’s a little bit of a subtle difference between not thinking and not assessing. You can assess without thinking, by using just your intuition. In this case, intuition is just another tool you use. Sometimes thinking will bring you the best results, sometimes intuition or other types of assessment. But the bottom line is if you’re really spontaneous you’re still assessing your actions, by using your intuition. If you’re just “going with the flow”,  without any type of assessment, mimicking intuition for the sake of being in somebody else’s flow, with all due respect, but you’re stupid.

Adaptation

So much for the spontaneity and stupidity, let’s get back to our overflow paradigm. Every time you’re putting something new on your plate, you’re overloading your system. That something could be anything: learning something new, changing career, entering a new relationship, whatever. Every new activity is a system overloader, it adds something to your current state. Usually, it adds something stressful.

Even if the change is beneficial to you, the stress will be there. In fact, every change is stressful, in the sense that it requires an adaptation period. You can’t really skip this. You may try to avoid it, you may try different escaping techniques, but it can’t be tricked.

Adaptation is a way of adjusting your internal vibration to match the vibrations of your external context. Unless you’re having a similar frequency, you’re not in sync. You can’t pretend you’re playing a sonata, while the Universe is playing a fugue. It just won’t match.

Adaptation is usually the biggest energy consumer in every change you’re involved. And if you’re constantly putting to much on your schedule, if you’re constantly trying to change your environment , your adaptation period will eventually run out of energy.  And a violent event will enter the scene in order to re-balance everything. You’re going to experiment another “system ”overloaded“ message.

Reboot Every Now And Then

Back when I had my online publishing business I was using Linux powered servers to host my sites. I was so proud when I looked at the log and see something like: “this system up and running for 234 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes”. To keep a server without a restart or reboot so long is usually a good sign. Uninterrupted functionality is critical for an online business.

Somehow, I started to mimic this behavior. Keeping an uninterrupted functionality flow for months, or even years was perceived like something good, the same way a server was doing. I was taking pride in it. I haven’t had a single holiday during my first 3 years of entrepreneurship and I even bragged about it. Unless I was not a computer. And every now and then I had to face some crash.

We’re an incredibly delicate and powerful energy manipulation machine. We’re so much better and infinitely complicated than a computer, which does a single job tremendously well: it stays up and serve sites. We’re doing so much more. We’re not supposed to stay up and serve clients uninterruptedly. This is why we invented computers in the first way, to do that for us.

We’re supposed to enjoy, to give, to receive, to love, to experience, to invent.

And we really can’t do that if we don’t reinvent ourselves every once in a while.

Make yourself a service and reboot your system every now and then.

Getting Something For Free

Do you like getting freebies? Gratuitous stuff? Free lunch, maybe? Well, I don’t.

I’ve always been like this, I have quite a repulsion towards free stuff. I become reluctant, I start to question myself, I back up. Although one may think that avoiding free stuff made for quite a difficult path for me so far (with the overwhelming stream of opportunities around), I will have to tell you the exact opposite. Avoiding free stuff made me far more wealthy and self confident than the average.

You know that old saying “there is no such thing as a free lunch”? Well, it’s still quite accurate.

The Exchange

Everything you do requires energy. Everything you receive was made with energy. Everything around you, including yourself, is a form of energy. And every time you start an interaction, you are initiating in fact an energetic exchange. Every form of communication is an energetic exchange.

Have you ever had a relaxing conversations with somebody else? Have you ever had a deep bonding with close, dear friends? Ever had a sense of exhilaration after closing a big business deal, a sale or just getting a promotion? All of these are successful energetic exchanges.

In each successful interaction our energy exchange is balanced, instant and beneficial. Balanced, instant and beneficial. Let’s take a closer look at this.

If we give more or less energy than it’s required, our energetic exchange is imbalanced. If we’re talking, for instance, and we give more energy than required, the other part may step back, ending the process. Or we find ourselves fighting instead of talking, opening our energy valves beyond control. Or we can find ourselves not responding in kind to other’s verbal flow, putting a lot less energy than required in the process. Whatever the cause, putting more or less energy than necessary, will make the interaction fail. This is an unbalanced energetic exchange.

If the response of our energetic exchange is delayed, we feel insecure. If we’re having an intimate relationship and the response to our interaction – making a gift to someone, for instance – is coming several hours later, we start asking why this is happening. Even if the response is positive, we start asking why we’re getting our response so late? Is something wrong with us? With the other one? With both? We feel insecure, and that’s because the energetic exchange was not instant, it was delayed. Most successful energetic exchanges are in the moment.

And if the energetic exchange was not mutually beneficial, we feel frustrated. If you close a deal under pressure, giving away some of your benefits, you feel frustrated. If you laugh and the other one cries, you feel frustrated. If you didn’t receive as much as you want from a conversation, you feel frustrated. That’s because the exchange wasn’t mutually beneficial, only one part of the exchange was favored. Most of our energy exchanges are not mutually beneficial, it’s always some part that will take a little more than we expect.

But despite these conditions, balanced, instant and beneficial energy exchanges are always possible. (more…)