In an effort to be a little more efficient with my time (to say nothing of a little less distracted), today I am piloting a new social media/email process to see how it works out. Basically, what I am doing is this:
- Not checking email, Facebook, Twitter or blog comments until after all of my work for the day is done. This includes day job work as well as writing.
- What this means is that more often than not, I won’t be checking email, Twitter, Facebook, or blog comments until after 8 pm Eastern Time each day. If I get all of my scheduled work for the day done earlier, I will check email and social media earlier.
That said, I plan to batch all email and social media responses that come in each day so that those that require response will go out the same day that they came in–something I don’t do right now. (I have unanswered email in my mailboxes going back to August 14. With this new process, it is my intention to have a zero inbox each night.
A few caveats while I work out the kinds in this pilot phase:
- You will see blog posts appear during the day. These are scheduled ahead of time. This one, for instance, was written last night, after I completed my writing for the day.
- You may see Tweets and Facebook posts during the day. In nearly all cases during this pilot, these are also scheduled (I use Buffer1, for those wondering) the night before.
- You may see emails during the day. In nearly all cases, these are also scheduled ahead of time (I use Boomerang in Gmail and Mailbox on iOS for this.)
- In rare instances, I may actually send an email or respond on social media during the day. During my pilot, this should be extremely rare, and almost certainly when someone has gotten in touch with me by phone with a need for me to respond quickly.
Bottom line: I will be actively absent from social media before the evening on most days. However, If you send me an email message, or leave a blog comment that requires a response, you should see a response on the same day–generally after 8 pm ET, but before 10 pm ET.
And, of course, I’ll let you know how this little experiment goes.
- Yes, I know that Buffer was hacked this weekend. No, I wasn’t affected, in part because I have good online security practices. ↩
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Excellent idea! I hope you will keep us updated on how it goes. As a teacher I simply don’t have time to check Facebook during the day, except on the rare occasion I have some free time at lunch. But on days off, the weekends and in the summer I can get sucked in to it all so I might have try implementing something like this myself.