A Social Media Swiss Army Knife: Five More Essential Tools and Tips

Alright, sticking with the "five things" theme that I began last week, here are a few more tools and tips that I thought of that I have been really thankful for over the past year or two: 

1. Link Your Stuff Together

This is probably both a tip and a tool. The tip part of it is the fact that no one should spend their time updating site after site after site. Granted there are cool sites to visit just for the sake of visiting them, but there are enough tools out there to link together your different sites that you shouldn't need to update more than one or two EVER. 

Here's how I do it: 

• I use tumblr, blogger, facebook, twitter, and linkedin. 
• I've got my tumblr hooked up with my twitter so that all of my tumblr posts appear as tweets. You can set that up through the "customize" button that Tumblr gives you in your dashboard. Once there click on "services" and you'll get an option to link your twitter account to your tumblr. 
• I've got my twitter hooked up with facebook so that my tweets come out as facebook status updates. Since my tumblr is hooked up to my twitter, that means all I have to do is update my tumblr and both my facebook and twitter will carry it. By the way, they leave out certain tweets automatically so you don't have to worry about your direct replies via twitter appearing as nonsensical facebook updates. 
• I have a gadget on my blogger blog that carries my 5 (there's that number again) most recent tweets. I also usually put a link on my tumblr whenever I update my blogger. Yes, that means I have to update two sites instead of one, but two's far more convenient than five, and there's hardly any work that goes into it. By the way, right now the most traffic I get on this blog by far comes from my tumblr links. 
• Finally, to top it all off, my blogger and twitter are both linked up to linkedin, meaning people can read both whenever they visit my linkedin profile. Usually this is a pretty different crowd from my other 4 sites, so this helps me keep connected to them. Again, linking the three sites together is as simple as just following the directions that linkedin gives you directly on your home page. 

2. Know When to Stop Consuming and Start Creating

I give KJ a lot of credit for putting this idea together nicely into a life philosophy. He put it slightly differently, but I think our points remain essentially the same: basically, in our day and age, we have an infinite amount of material to read, watch, and listen. IMDB alone can suck you in for hours. But there comes a point when we're to "consume less and create more" (that's how KJ put it). 

Actually, Seth Godin (and I got the link from What's Best Next) makes a really similar point here with regards to productivity. It used to be that you'd go into a library, research for a day, and then you'd run out of books and have to start writing. True no longer. Now you could spend the rest of your life researching and still not be done learning about a topic. 

The trick now is to know when to put the book down, turn off the screen, and begin writing/doing/creating. C.S. Lewis used to advise writers to write one page a day, regardless of what it was about or whether they'd keep it later or whether they were feeling writers block or not. You may not be a writer, but the point is your life wasn't meant to be spent just absorbing material. You were meant to create, and that means knowing when to stop consuming, and when to start doing. 

3.  Beware of Multitasking

I've been reading over and over again about what "search" does to our brains, and it isn't pretty. Basically the research is starting to show that our attention spans are shrinking, and with them our ability to really focus and concentrate. That means we're getting better at skimming over the top of a lot of things, but we're getting worse at digging deep. That means things like in depth analysis and insightful commentary are becoming harder and harder for us. 

I experience this problem first hand. All it takes is one tangent and I could be lost for half an hour (on a good day) just barking up the wrong tree. Multiply that by a few tangents, and by the end of the day I feel like I've wasted it. The solution, I think, is to intentionally know when it's time to be focusing on one thing, and when it's time to be flexible to search and research whatever you think you need to. 

All this, by the way, feeds right into the fifth thing, but let me slip in one other thing first...

4. The Written To-Do List

I discovered this truth recently. 

It turns out that written to do lists are just a whole lot more effective than electronic ones, in part I think because of the points I've just made. It's too easy to get caught up in the whole web of the internet when you're working with electronic to-do lists (more syncing, more effective apps!). On the other hand, keeping your to-do lists on a piece of paper (I like to keep it in my ministry notebook) serves to automatically pull you back into a time of focus and concentration away from your phone and laptop. 

You can find corroborating evidence from one of the many people who suggest something along these lines here. 

5. Last and Most Importantly: Time With God

Our men's discipleship group at United Life has made a commitment to spend time with God, in his word, every day throughout the course of our discipleship group. It has resulted in some great devotional blogging that has really encouraged me and I know others. 

For myself, it is amazing how easy it is for me to go a whole day with God on the back burner. This is ironic when my vocation is to make him known. Imagine Steve Jobs forgetting that he's working for Apple as he meets with his board to come up with their next product line. 

But it is no less incongruent for any follower of Christ to try to do life without Christ. We all need daily time with him if we are to continue to follow him. There are just too many other attractions and gravities in our lives that pull us away from the path that he's cleared for us. It really doesn't even take 24 hours for us to be fully turned around and off course, so even once a day might be too little. 

You get my point. 

All of the rest of this stuff is just kids playing in a sandbox unless we're first anchored in Christ. We need to spend time with him daily. We need to read his word. We need to hear the message he has for us over and over again, with this being a good place to start.