Business Insight Zone

I’ve said something similar before, and now Joshua-Michéle Ross of O’Reilly Radar says it well in this post:

The fact is that there are already tons of other outside distractions at work ranging from instant message, email, workplace socializing and the never ending cigarette break — so this is not a new problem — but an old concern applied to a new technology.

Better, he gets at the real problem that underlies companies’ complaints about productivity lost to social media:

Companies that think they may have a productivity problem because of social networks and the like actually have a measurement problem — that is — they don’t know how to objectively measure whether an employee is meeting standards of productivity.

You can read his whole post here.

It’s funny that I should come across Josh’s post just now, for two reasons:

1. This was a day of interruptions. Partly this was my own fault, partly it was beyond my control, but the result was that I worked plenty, edged ahead on several things . . . but didn’t have any great victories to show for it. What I hear from friends and colleagues suggests to me that a lot of us have this same experience all too often.
2. One of the good interruptions in my day came in the form of a talk with a colleague about the mechanics of an internal communications project we’re pondering. One of the key issues: how to harvest the benefits of social media tools without creating ever more inboxes or sources of pings to interrupt our days. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on that one — not just in our office, but everywhere.

What do you think? Do social media tools hamper productivity more than e-mail, meetings, and other, older types of interruptions?

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Related posts:

• Managers beware: Facebook isn’t the problem — e-mail is.
• Your brain hates Twitter.
• Monkeys love bananas, humans love e-mails.

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Category: Productivity, Social media