There was a very interesting infographic created by Domo which revealed “Every minute of the day” statistics on what people did online. It had some mind blowing facts such as:
Amazon Makes $83,000 in online sales – every minute of the day
Instagram users post 216,000 new photos – every minute of the day
Now this infographic covers everything from Apple downloads to Vine users but it got me thinking:
Do we all understand the goals of the different digital platforms available to us and in reality, how much time are we using…and wasting on each of these?
To answer this question for all of us including myself, I decided to take a look at just the tools which I think are crucial to all us business fanatics out there. For each one I identified the one true goal for using it and two tips for extracting the most out of them without wasting time.
Email users send 204,000,000 messages – every minute of the day
Single most important goal of Email – Coordination
Yes that’s all – coordination. So you have to ask yourself, will the job get done if you call someone, meet them in person or email them? And then, if you must email, there are simply two action steps you need to take on a daily basis to keep your inbox under control:
- Scan your inbox – reply to everything that will get done today.
- Tackle the more difficult tasks – if you don’t, they’ll never get done.
Google receives over 2,000,000 search queries – every minute of the day
Single most important goal of Google – Educating Yourself
It’s a pretty big goal and you could be educating yourself on anything – from the right processes for your department to a background check on a person. If you’re anything like the average person, you’ll easily get distracted from one topic to another. So, make sure you’re googling without wasting time by:
- Knowing how to google efficiently.
- Focussing on only one topic at a time.
Facebook users share 684, 478 pieces of content – every minute of the day
Twitter users send over 100,000 tweets – every minute of the day
Single most important goal of Facebook and Twitter – Networking
I’m going to merge these two because no matter how many hours you spend on either one of these platforms, professionally you should be using them for networking. Which means that you shouldn’t be spending HOURS on them in the first place. If you are – you’re wasting time. Here’s how to focus your efforts on both of them:
- Create Facebook Interest Lists and Twitter Lists to keep your pages and accounts organized. You can break them into sub-lists such as companies, trainings, groups etc. to help you access the right information when you need it.
- Set a limited duration at a fixed time during the day to do your social networking. It could be 15 min, half an hour, or even an hour…but it needs to be in accordance with your need of networking.
WordPress Users Publish 347 New Blog Posts – every minute of the day
Blogging – you have to love it. The amount of information that it has opened up is staggering. Anyone can be a blogger if they set their mind to it but it can also become an obsession. To make sure you’re using a blogging platform as efficiently as possible you want to:
- Stick to as schedule. Decide how many times a week you want to blog and accordingly pre-set a time to do your writing. That way, you won’t be preoccupied with your blog posts while you should be focusing on something else.
- Since most bloggers tend to read blogs as well, set a time for blog reading just like for social networking.
These are some basic goals and tips to get yourself organized in the digital part of your day. If you really want to gain a deeper understanding of using social media, download my Social Media Toolkit which dives into 15 different tools to advance your career.