Lately I have realised, that this rise in modern technology and expansion of social media has only made procrastination worse.
Procrastination: putting off or delaying or defering an action to a later time.
At first it was Bebo, and then MySpace. When Facebook came into the picture, procrastination began to increase. When you went on the internet to do your work and research, you just had to go on Facebook first to check what’s going on. You see your notifications, messages, scroll down your news feed for quite a while, click on your friends pictures and go through each picture in the album. You then realize that you have work to do so it’s probably best to get off Facebook, although you leave the tab open to quickly check back now and then.
And then came Twitter. You sign up, just because everyone else does. You realize that, with this new social media you can follow celebrities. None of that sending friend requests and never getting accepted, you can actually follow them and see what they do, see what they say and what they tweet. So you go on and follow loads of celebs, read all their tweets, scroll down and read old ones. You go on their pictures, go through them all and go back to your twitter news feed. You can read the news, look at the trends, laugh at all the trends that people are saying. Trend yourself, tweet some more. Follow more celebs.
And now you’ve got Pinterest. You don’t want your boards to be empty so you set them all up, repin loads of pictures and scroll through them all, laugh at some, pin some more. You add the app to your desktop so whenever you see some nice pics you can pin them, redirecting you straight back to the social media site.
Of course there is Linkedin. You need to update your latest work experience, education and employment. You want to connect with that person you met at work the other day. You can look for jobs, stalk other people.
Not forgetting the fact that most people blog nowadays. You don’t want your blog to look neglected, where you only post every other week. You want your followers to keep coming back, so you have to write another post, make it look good. Then you want people to read it, so you post it to Twitter, and Facebook… and so the cycle goes round again.
Sound familiar? And that’s only half of it.
It’s not surprising that I barely ever get all my work done with all these addictive social media programs right in front of me on my laptop screen. A long with the ones that I use, I can imagine that there are a lot more… Google Plus and Tumblr, Flickr, Stumble Upon, etc. My opinion, is that the rise of all these sites, have corresponded with a rise in people getting distracted. No you can’t really go on the internet without checking them all, and there’s nothing worse than having neglected accounts. So on top of your work, part of you feels that you HAVE to update and check them all.
The fact is, social media has become a huge part of our lives now and not something you can really choose to ignore. It’s not just a site that some people visit, it has become a necessity. The huge rise has caused companies to recruit a new position – social media assistant. Yes – a job simply updating the social media for a company and their site. Having neglected twitter accounts is almost embarrassing if you’re a big publication.
No wonder I never get anything done!