The diagram put the big unknown of one’s social media marketing time commitment into perspective. Kanter’s diagram was by no means discouraging, but led people to say “OK, I will start with listening — that seems manageable.” And that was just what many of us advise people to do when just starting out with social media marketing: Listen.

Two years later, and things have evolved in several ways:

1. There are more tools available to help us take part in social media activities.
2. There are more best practices for newbies to find and follow.
3. There are many tips published online on how to be more efficient in one’s efforts.

I have a new presentation coming up this week to an audience at varying stages of social media adoption, but mostly on the early end of the spectrum. I’m sure I’ll once again get the question “But how long does it take?” So I played around with Kanter’s original diagram to create my own. I wanted to illustrate not only how long each activity should take, but also to identify additional tools that can be useful in each area:

This diagram is by no means perfect, but I’m striving to keep it easy to understand for the layperson. I also wanted to address some of the efficiencies we’ve worked out the more we’ve used these tools. For example, I blogged about how to mine Twitter’s wealth in 15 minutes a day. I wanted to show that you don’t need to spend hours a day on Twitter or Facebook or the like to be effective in your efforts.

I reordered “Participate” and “Generate Buzz” activities from Kanter’s original diagram, and renamed the latter “Promote.”  I reordered them because we now have tools that make promoting something (generating buzz) so much speedier. Participating — even at a cursory level of engagement — really takes more time and consideration even though useful tools are also there. The tools may make it easier for us to monitor and participate in our social media channels, but we are now monitoring and participating in many more channels than before.

What I tried to avoid was listing all of the hundreds of apps that could fit in under each category; instead I referenced the more popular and effective tools to give a sense of what one can use. The main goal of this is to show the person new to all things social media that it doesn’t have to take an unmanageable amount of time to handle your social media activities but as you want to connect more deeply and leverage your social channels more strongly, you will cumulatively rack up the need for a greater time commitment.

I hope this diagram — or a future iteration of it — becomes a useful slide in any Social Media 101 presentation. Eventually, this, too, will become obsolete or irrelevant, but until then, how can it be improved?

What is my diagram missing? Where is it off base? Where is it right on the money?

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On the other hand, when it comes to social engagements (parties in particular), I’ve had a bad reputation with my husband for being ready to leave many minutes beyond the designated departure time. I’d say, “I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’’ and 45 minutes later, I’m set to walk out the door. This has caused endless frustration (and a few fights), so I finally sat down and figured out why I could keep my appointments for paying clients, but not for parties. The answer — I was in time denial.

Time denial, at its bottom line, is an underestimation of the amount of time it will take to do something. That something can be preparing a report for your boss, writing a proposal for a potential client, driving into the office for your weekly catch-up meeting or getting dressed for a party. Basically, the amount of time you think it’s going to take to execute the action is longer in reality than the ideal plan you’ve cooked up in your mind.

While social time denial may annoy and frustrate your loved ones, business time denial can take a bite out of your personal productivity, impact your reputation with clients and co-workers and, in general, leave you a stressed-out mess.

Karen Southall Watts, who teaches entrepreneurship at Bellingham Technical College in Washington State, says that time denial can be especially challenging for those who work out of their homes.

Watts explains that in the normal course of the workday, company dwellers can count on predictable clues to help them mange their time. Lunch hour, regularly scheduled meetings, and designated breaks all form a boundary around which time can be planned. But for house dwellers (read: freelancers and telecommuters) it’s much easier to slip into the distraction of chores and lose track of time.

To get out of time denial requires making a more accurate assessment of the time needed to get somewhere or do something. To keep your train running on track, try these three solutions borrowed from my book, “Time Management In An Instant:”

• Begin with the end in mind. If you want to figure out exactly how long it will take you to meet your deadline, work backward to calculate the steps. Working backward to calculate steps that need to be taken, and the time they will take, helps clarify exactly what needs to get done by when. For example: If you plan on arriving at the weekly sales meeting at 2 p.m., and you live 30 minutes away, departing at 1:30 p.m. sets you up for failure. Instead, do a more accurate assessment of what goes into traveling from your home office to your corporate one. Items such as meeting preparation time and changing out of your casual clothes and into work attire need to be taken into consideration.
• Consider the worst-case scenario. A mind in time denial can soften and blur the realities of what it will take to get from A to B. Always plan a 10 percent time buffer for emergencies, changes and delays of game. For example: Traffic may be heavier than you imagined; you may have to do an unexpected, last-minute task; parking might prove more difficult than you expect; etc.
• Don’t underestimate the little things. A lot of lateness occurs because insufficient attention was paid to the little things, especially those that connect one activity to the next. For example, as you are getting ready to leave, gathering together your wallet, purse, keys and directions all add time that needs to be accounted for.

As simple as these steps may seem, they can drastically cut down on the amount of drama in your day. So the next time you find yourself on the edge of cutting it too close to the clock, stop, stand back and step away from time denial — you’re sure to breath a sigh of relief when you show up on time.

Are you in time denial?

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We all have different ways of working based on our body clocks and personal preferences. I get my best work done between 7am and 2pm. I usually try to get up between 6am and 7am, and head right to the computer to catch up on East Coast client email and take care of any urgent items before hitting the shower and starting my day.

Between 7am and 2pm, I work mostly on client projects and writing. I also schedule many of my client meetings during this time and most of my posts for this blog are written in the morning and early afternoon. I try to schedule non-billable meetings after 2pm, so most of my business development or informational meetings are scheduled in the late afternoon. I also try to schedule my workouts in the late afternoon / early evening when my productivity is waning, as I need something to re-energize me.

I also try to combine meetings where possible to avoid spending too much time in transit getting from one meeting to the next. My favorite way to do this is to combine meetings with a Friday afternoon event in Portland called Beer and Blog. By Friday afternoon, I am usually less focused when sitting at home trying to get work done, so I try to schedule meetings right before Beer and Blog. This gets me out of the house, gets the energy level back up, and reduces travel time by bringing my meetings to the same location as an event that I plan to attend anyway.

This doesn’t mean that I am completely inflexible when it comes to scheduling. I sometimes end up doing client work in the afternoon or evening to meet a deadline, and I often end up with random non-work coffee meetings with people in the morning to accommodate busy schedules. I can be flexible, but I certainly have my preferences for certain types of work at specific times.

Until last week, I didn’t realize how big of an impact my schedule had on my productivity. In Portland, we were having a heat wave with temperatures in the 90s all week, which meant that my afternoon workouts were nearly impossible, so I shifted my workouts into the morning and my client work into the late afternoon. While I was able to beat the heat and get my workouts finished before the temperature hit 80 degrees, I found it much more difficult to finish my client work. I was able to get everything finished, but I was more easily distracted in the afternoons, and I missed having the workout as a way to get my energy levels back up. We’re having another heat wave this week, but now that I am more aware of how my productivity is impacted by my schedule, maybe I can make a few more tweaks that result in less of an impact to my productivity.

How do you schedule your time? How does your schedule impact your productivity?

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1. Type in and perform your search
2. On the results page click the “show options…” button in the blue bar
3. A sidebar will pop out, select “recent results”

Here’s a quick screencast video showing it in action:

WWD Screencast: Google Search Based on Time from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Another alternative to search news via Google is Google Blog Search. It specifically searches blog articles for whatever you want. One set back to just searching blogs is that you are not searching forums, and often times forums have more current and (sometimes) accurate information.

Have you been using Google’s time-filtered results? Do you think it is or isn’t an important feature based on your web search habits?

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When you first visit the Permatime site, you’ll be asked to pick your own timezone – you can type in something like “PST” or “Central” or “Belgrade” and a dropdown list will help you choose. Then, you’ll see your current time in your local timezone. That’s not much – but if you then add “London” and “Moscow” you’ll see the time in all three zones. The site remembers you timezones across visits, too, so if you have a spread-out team you can set it up once and then just go there for current times whenever you want.

But that’s not where the “permatime” comes in. There’s also a button on the user interface to create a new permatime, and when you click it, you get to pick any arbitrary date and time, as well as one of your default timezones. The system will then cough up a URL for you. For example, I’m likely to take my kids trick-or-treating around http://permatime.com/America/Chicago/2008-10-31/17:20. You can see from the URL when that is – and if you visit that URL and set your own timezone, you’ll get the time translated into your local zone.

There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but my experience has been that timezones lead to missed meetings more than anything else. So any service that makes it easier to treat time as a constant rather than a variable has my vote.

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