I just got back from a week vacation. I was almost completely away from the internet the entire week - no email, RSS, blogs, Twitter, or Facebook. Aside from about 1 hour during the week in which I checked my personal email, everything else was on hold and I knew it was growing. When I came into the office this morning, I had several hundred emails, over 1500 RSS feeds, and a whole week of Twitter messages to untangle.A few observations:
- I ended up just deleting or marking lots of emails and articles right away in order to bail the water out of the boat quicker. While most days this tends to take place on a smaller and slightly slower scale, I found my "scanning eyes" were moving quite quickly. Lesson learned: Maybe there are lots of things that I don't really need to read even during a normal week.
- After visiting a few sites, I was able to establish a picture of some of the things I had missed. I watched TweetWeek to get a recap of some of Twitter happenings. I scanned PopURLs to look for top stories that I may have missed. Lesson learned: Sites that compile and recap can be just as helpful as reading it all yourself, but takes a lot less time.
- Although I tried to eliminate the clutter and ignore the "echo chamber" effect of social media buzz, there was still a good amount to read. Lesson learned: There is no way around the fact that you must be "in" social media to understand what is going on.
- After getting somewhat caught up, an interesting thought popped into my mind: Did I really miss anything? Through reading recaps, eliminating the waste, and ignoring the echo chamber, I was able to effectively catch up in a fraction of the time I normally would have. It seems like there is not only a lot of repeating going on in social media, but there may also be a lot of things that can waste your time. Possible lesson learned: Maybe a week away isn't as detrimental as I thought it could be.
Where do you go to get caught up when you get behind on news, social media happenings, etc?
Could you be away from Twitter/Facebook/etc for a week and not implode?
If you were away one week, what would you really miss that couldn't be remedied with a little catch up?