Deciding What Your Time Is Worth

Social media is fun, ubiquitous, and can even be educational. You know what else it is? A time suck. I constantly find myself asking, is this time I should spend writing or tweeting, facebooking, replying to forum posts etc.? Or, let's not forget, reading! Smart phones (and I'm assuming tablets though I do not have one yet and cannot speak from personal experience) make social networking a little easier by allowing you to multitask. You can send a tweet while you're waiting in line at the grocery store or commuting to or from work if you take the bus, train, or carpool or something.

Still, it's difficult to cram everything you want to do into one day, and social media is no exception to this. In fact, as I'm writing this post, I'm thinking of a thousand other things I need to be doing. One time-saving trick that I love is retweeting useful and/or entertaining information. Retweeting takes up less time than composing your own tweets, and everybody's happy. The original poster gets a retweet out of it (and retweets are always nice to see in your connections), your followers get a good tweet they might not have seen otherwise, and you get to tweet without doing the legwork, so to speak. Tweeting links to blog posts or articles or other useful info is also good and takes relatively little time. People seem to like this, too. I've even ended up in people's daily newsletters shared via twitter thanks to my tweeted links.

So that's one useful way to save time on Twitter. How about you? How do you tackle your internet v. daily life multitasking?

And in other news, I have recently discovered Pinterest thanks to my friends. I don't know if you've heard of this Pinterest, but if I am late to the party, blame the rock I live under. I need some more time to familiarize myself with it before I do a post about it, though. So next time, Pinterest!