The social network addiction

The other day I went on Facebook to find that most of my working friends online, chatting away. The same thing happened when I visited Twitter. This got me thinking...is this addiction affecting our work?

I don’t think one can truly focus on your work if you are constantly chatting or updating your status or Tweeting. First of all, when chatting you will need to keep the window open, which mean you will constantly interrupt yourself with what you are doing to check if you got a knew message and to reply. Same with twitter, you will constantly read what others are tweeting and update yours. In the first place I can’t see why you have to Tweet every 10 minutes. Seriously, there are more important things to do. This will only affect your work performance and end up in you not doing the best you can do. Even worst is how rude people can be, while you are in a meeting with them, they will Tweet or be on Facebook. This is very unprofessional!

Also, It is not a clever idea to invite all your colleagues and superiors as friends on both Facebook and Twitter and whatever other social network. There are boundaries, these people are not your friends and they might just loose respect for you when they see what you do in your free time. You should separate your work environment from your home environment. A woman found this out the hard way. She updated her Facebook status, stating how boring her work is and how much she hates her job. Her boss commented, in that case, if she felt that way she did not bother coming in again.

Facebook and Twitter have indeed become an addiction. Just the other day I heard on the radio how a women electrocuted herself while she was taking a bath, just because she had to Tweet and her laptop fell into the bathtub.

People need to break away from social networks a bit. There is a time and place for everything. Focus on what you need to do at work and put everything into that. There will always be time for “Facebooking” and Tweeting when you get home or during your lunch break.