Wilma C. Inventor-Miranda l July 17, 2024 l Business Mirror
AS I was writing this article and researching further on this topic, I realized I wasted time going through the notifications in my Viber chat and Facebook messenger instead of going straight to the topic I want to research on. If you experienced such kind of distractions too, welcome to the club. They say notifications play a great part in distracting and wasting people’s time. There are notifications that are really important, but one has to be selective.
To optimize our use of social media and derive maximum benefits, it is crucial to align it with our goals. This involves ensuring that the content we consume is in line with the specific information we seek.
For instance, your goal is to know how to improve your business or profession—you should search intentionally for information on how to bring your business to the next level—what innovative approaches you will use or what strategies to undertake to reach your business goals.
On the personal side, watch only YouTube contents that will align, for instance, with your health goals or spiritual growth goals (these are actually my personal goals). Entertainment contents can take up much of your time without sometimes giving you the benefits—if you want an entertainment break, limit to a few minutes if possible. Unfollow people who fill your feeds with contents that are not of value to you.
Mindlessly scrolling will be taking a lot of your time since you will just be shifting from one stimulus to another. What you intend to be just a 15-minute break will end up an hour or two before you realize how much time you spent just scrolling. I am writing this because I am reminding myself too since there are instances when I am also wasting a lot of my time on the distractions of social media.
These are important not only in our personal lives but also in our workplaces. According to an article in aisle.aisnet.org (on the topic: Social Media Induced Technostress) individuals admitted they spend 27 percent of their time on social media. In a survey by KellOCG of 168,000 respondents, 47 percent said they believed that social media had negatively affected their productivity. In a sample of over 1,000 business professionals and employees, they admitted routinely checking their social media throughout the workday (obviously not work-related). Keep this in mind and include in your training sessions in the office the proper use of social media—both personal and work-related.
We should also remember that people who post on social media such as Instagram and Facebook only post the highlight of their lives (the best and brightest moments). We do not see behind-the-scenes of their lives and we get distracted because we do not have the big house they have or the new branded bags they just bought or vacationing in some places or visiting other countries. These posts only distract us from the values we should uphold, but they start to discourage us, when in fact we maybe even far better off than those people. Such posts create discontentment and we begin to count what we do not have instead of counting the blessings we have, and sometimes they ruin our day.
One speaker (Bailey Parnell in Ted Talks) relates that a friend of hers in school posted an enviable vacation relaxing in seawater and she asked herself why can’t she take a vacation like that? But she is a good friend of hers and she knows that friend is drowning in school work.
But her Facebook friends only see her relaxing and having a good time. Another dark side of social media is, it can be addictive. According to Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, our fascination with technology can be likened to addiction to substances. One sign of addiction is when you spend more time on social media than you plan to.
One very important thing that I learned from a favorite book, “Things that Matter” by Joshua Becker, is to be more of a contributor than a consumer. Ask yourself if you are creating content that will be useful to the world or am I just a constant consumer of the contents of others?
There is a quote, “you are what you read,” but I would like to revise it a little—“you are what you are now because of the contents on social media that you read or watch.”
Years from now you may look back at how you spent your life—may it be filled with gratefulness rather than regrets because you spent your time well here on earth, not distracted or addicted to social media but had the freedom to use your time wisely.
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One of the writers for FINEX’s rotating column for BusinessMirror, Wilma Miranda is the 2024 Chair of FINEX Ethics Committee, Managing Partner of Inventor, Miranda & Associates, CPAs, and Member-Board of Directors Member of KPS Outsourcing Inc. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinion of FINEX and these institutions. Photo from Pinterest.