Everyone talks about social media. Social media this and social media that. No matter what you do you should use social media to build up your potential, speed up your growth and create new opportunities.
Project management or software development is no different here. As a project manager or a developer you should run a blog and read many others. Not only read though, you should comment often too. You should of course use the coolest tool these days – Twitter. Don’t forget about communities, yep, a number of them. And keep your profiles alive on all these social sites, starting from Facebook and finishing at LinkedIn. Oh, you should participate in different groups of professionals there as well. Now, you keep your finger on the pulse.
Let me ask one question: while exercising all these activities how do you find time to actually manage projects or to develop some code from time to time? “I don’t have private life” counts for the answer if you ask me, but I wouldn’t advise you to go that way.
I understand a trend to incorporate every new cool service which is out there to our professional lives but sometimes it starts to be counterproductive. People focus on “socializing” instead of getting things done. Mixing software development or project management with social media doesn’t have to be win-win because some guru said so.
OK, time for confession. I read blogs. I run one. You read it so it’d be hard to hide the fact anyway. I comment here and there from time to time. Heck, I even joined Twitter (follow me there). And yes, I still have time to work and my wife still hasn’t divorced me, which is a sign I cope quite well with the situation. However, except of keeping blogging frequency on typical level (at least a couple of posts weekly), every other activity is dropped whenever I don’t have enough free time.
What more, I could abandon (almost) all these routines with no real influence on my work quality. The only one I’d spare would be reading some stuff to keep learning new things.
Does all social media thing help my projects? Nope. Do I see any simple way to change it? Nope. At the moment twitter-like communication in projects is more making up a theory to ground usage of a tool than fulfilling a real gap in our everyday practices.
Now as I published this post, I’ll tweet about that and check interesting things people wrote on their blogs. Maybe I’ll even drop a comment somewhere. It won’t make my tomorrow work day even a bit easier though.
Let me ask one question: while exercising all these activities how do you find time to actually manage projects or to develop some code from time to time? “I don’t have private life” counts for the answer if you ask me, but I wouldn’t advise you to go that way.
I understand a trend to incorporate every new cool service which is out there to our professional lives but sometimes it starts to be counterproductive. People focus on “socializing” instead of getting things done. Mixing software development or project management with social media doesn’t have to be win-win because some guru said so.
OK, time for confession. I read blogs. I run one. You read it so it’d be hard to hide the fact anyway. I comment here and there from time to time. Heck, I even joined Twitter (follow me there). And yes, I still have time to work and my wife still hasn’t divorced me, which is a sign I cope quite well with the situation. However, except of keeping blogging frequency on typical level (at least a couple of posts weekly), every other activity is dropped whenever I don’t have enough free time.What more, I could abandon (almost) all these routines with no real influence on my work quality. The only one I’d spare would be reading some stuff to keep learning new things.
Does all social media thing help my projects? Nope. Do I see any simple way to change it? Nope. At the moment twitter-like communication in projects is more making up a theory to ground usage of a tool than fulfilling a real gap in our everyday practices.
Now as I published this post, I’ll tweet about that and check interesting things people wrote on their blogs. Maybe I’ll even drop a comment somewhere. It won’t make my tomorrow work day even a bit easier though.
