Turn off Facebook. Seriously. And Twitter. And LinkedIn. And all the places where you’re spending the whole day pretending to work.

Don’t get me wrong: All three are great tools to find clients and partners. As you might remember, we even gave a webinar on social media marketing.

But for me they were also productivity killers. I used to check my notification feeds whenever I could spare a moment (and even when I couldn’t), wasting an enormous amount of time and mind power.

So what did I do? Something very simple: I started scheduling my Facebook time. I set myself a daily task of checking into my “virtual society.”

The results were mind blowing. Even though I have more than a hundred of notifications every day, I spend much less time going through all of them than what used to pile up when I was processing them one by one.

Why?

First of all, I don’t need to switch between social and “asocial” tasks. When I “plug in,” my mind turns on the “Facebook mode,” and I’m free to explore the updates without anything holding me back.

Secondly, I’m not pondering over the content I’ve come across (or posted) throughout the rest of the day. My mind is vacant for other tasks I have — and I can now handle many more of them.

And, last but not least, I no longer spend my Facebook time reading updates that I don’t really care about. No more celebrity gossips and best-of lists that seem huge but have actually no relation to my personal or professional life. All this is out of my radar, and I can focus on what really matters — updates from fellow translators or really useful posts, for example.

Paraphrasing the maxim, Facebook is dead — long live Facebook (and the others)!

What about you? Do you sometimes feel caught up in the social networking loop? How do you get out?

Or do you?

Originally published on Ab Hoc.