How Social Media Is Wrecking Your Career And What You Can Do To Stop It.

I like to write. It’s why I've authored three novels, thirty-some non-fiction books, hundreds of articles published everywhere including Playboy, PCgamer, and Autoweek, and almost four hundred posts in this blog. But you can’t write in a vacuum. Writers need an audience.

I’m Internet fluent. Hell, way back when I even wrote a book on the Internet. I’m social media savvy. I’ve grown the Facebook page of Lock ‘nLoad Publishing from zero to over 3, 000 active participants. By the same token, I’ve grown my Twitter following from nil to over 7,000 followers in a few short months. And I did that the hard way. I’m not a handsome/cute twenty-something guy/girl who can flash smiles/cleavage on his/her way to 22,000 followers, but rather a grizzled old-timer who just puts in a lot of time at it. And lately I've been thinking about that time.

I've heard that social media is the wave, not the wave of the future, but the wave right now, crashing on the beach. I've studied it, I understand the 80-20 principle, learned how to amass Twitter followers, engage Facebook fans, and blog with the best of them. And I think it might just be a load of crap.

Let me explain.

I don’t argue that social media is a valid means to promote your writing (or game designing). What I’m arguing is the cost-return equation. Fellow authors and game designers, how much time do you spend on social media daily? Two weeks ago I tracked myself for five days. The results were just about what I imagined. Between Facebook, Twitter, and the two prominent gaming forums with which I interact, I spent 1.5 hours a day typing, reading, and engaging in pointless arguments with strangers. Let’s assume a five-day workweek. Some quick multiplication tells me 1.5 hours x 5 days equals 7.5 hours per week, 390 hours per year, or—if you work nine hours a day—almost

Curse you Mark Zuckerburg! I think.

43 work days.

Of course that doesn't include the time spent writing this blog, which even on light weeks (maybe two posts) is another couple of hours per week. On heavier weeks it could be as much as ten hours of blog related writing per week. So let’s say an average of four hours per week blogging, or 208 hours for the year. That’s another 23 days. For those keeping score we are up to 66 workdays per year spent social mediaing (sic).

Pretty grim, but it gets worse. No one switches off the game that they are currently designing, switches onto Facebook posts, and then switches back to their game without wasting more time to refocus on the task. Some studies argue that this refocusing can take up to 25 minutes.  Certainly that estimate is at the high end of the spectrum, but even if the number is closer to 10 minutes to regain your focus, that equates to many more minutes lost in the day. Let’s say a half an hour or 2.5 hours per week. Another 14 work days. So total time spent on social media? Looks like 80 days to me, or approximately four work months every year.

Of course there are a lot of success stories birthed from the annals of social media. John Scalzi, whose blog, Whatever, is number one on the list when you type the word into Google, has been writing a daily blog since blogs were delivered by Pony Express. It arguably has made his fame and career. On the other hand, D.J. Molles and his zombie series, The Remaining. are fantastically popular, garnering thousands of rave reviews on Amazon. Molles doesn't have a Twitter account, and posts on The Remaining Facebook account about twice a month. So much for social networking.

Think about four work months. I can write a novella in four months, design a game, fix everything that’s wrong with my home, spend a lot of family weekends with the wife and kids, and maybe even take a vacation. The bottom line is that although social media helps, I doubt it helps four months worth. Seems like all of us techno-sapiens (Def Leppard’s word, not mine) boarded the social media train a few years back without asking where it would stop, or even how fast it would go. Now we are zipping through the cyberscape, investing several months a year to self-promotion with dubious results. What can be done?

I’m not sure, but I can offer some suggestions. Find software that allows you to manage and schedule all your postings (I use Hootsuite.). After doing so spend some time—this usually takes me no more then 30 minutes—to schedule your posts for the next few days. This drastically reduces the time spent logging on and off several sites and the distractions they offer. Of course everything can’t be scheduled. People want interaction. Set an interaction schedule and stick to it. Rather than log on to the social media morass daily. Try to limit yourself to twice a week. For example, set aside an hour or two on Tuesday and Friday, cruise through all your social media hangs, and then log off. This not only reduces the time spent on Facebook, Twitter, etc, but also limits the refocus time we discussed previously.

Finally, write a blog about wasting time with social media. If you do so, you’ll feel like a fake if you lapse into your old social media, time-sucking ways. Good luck. I hope to be posting a bit less, yet writing and designing a bit more.

Mark H. Walker is the author of World at War: Revelation, a creepy, military action, with a love story, alternate history, World War Three novel thing. It's available from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing right here. Just $2.99. Give it a try. What the hell?