Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, and Twitter with others to explore living wisely in our modern age. Mashable readers can use code ‘Mashable‘ for a discount when registering.There have never been more things that call out for our attention: We have tweets to read, FacebookFacebook
statuses to check, and now Google BuzzGoogle Buzz updates — not to mention text messages, e-mails, and cell phone calls. And the amount of data is growing each day. Recent reports estimate that the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day, including 100,000 words of information.While this access to information has numerous benefits, learning to live and work skillfully amidst an active social media lifestyle is an art in itself — one that will be increasingly challenging in the years ahead.
When we do not manage our social media life, our attention (the essential element for any task) gets more and more divided, and we end up constantly busy, but not very effective. We find ourselves at the end of the day overwhelmed and fatigued, wondering, “Just what did I actually accomplish today?”
Below are four lessons in staying sane and focused amidst an active social media lifestyle.
1. Know the External Reflects the Internal
“The biggest (and hardest) lesson I’ve learned in life is that the external world is just a reflection of the world within.” — Tony Hsieh, CEO of ZapposOne of the essential questions for those of us who live active social media lives is, “Where should I put my attention? How much of my attention should I give to Facebook, TwitterTwitter
, Google Buzz, YouTubeYouTube, or another site?”However, while the amount of our attention that we give to social media is important, so is the quality of that attention. It is hard to give our full attention to anything when internally we are feeling overwhelmed and unfocused. Our internal state gets mirrored in the external world, so even though we may spend a lot of time on social media sites, it may not be spent productively.
Taking time to settle your mind when you notice yourself off balance or overwhelmed — whether it is through a walk, a visit to the gym, or whatever works for you — can shift the state of your internal world such that you have a greater chance of making your time on social media more effective.
Lesson: Balance the internal before taking action in the external.
2. Do One Thing at a Time
“When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer — often double the time or more — to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially.” — David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory at the University of MichiganI know this may sound counter-intuitive, but give it a try. Whatever you are doing, put all your attention on that. This means resisting the tendency to multi-task. In fact, a recent study at Stanford found that the more people multi-task, the worse they become at it.
Yes, that’s right — the more you do it, the worse at it you get. The illusion, of course, is that the busier we are, and the more we “do,” the more we accomplish. The research, curiously, paints a different picture.
Instead of checking Twitter or Facebook while also talking on your cell, finish one first, then do the next.
Lesson: Put all your attention on whatever you are doing at any given moment.
3. Invite Instead of Force
“Do or do not. There is no try.” — YodaThe idea that the harder we try, the more we will get done, and the happier we will be is a myth. Of course, some effort is needed in any endeavor, but the real question is, “what kind of effort are we putting forth?” We have all likely met people who work like mad at their endeavors, including social media, yet consistently get very few results.
Some time ago I interviewed George Mumford, the sports psychologist who helped Chicago Bulls players during the Michael Jordan era get “in the zone” (he later also helped Los Angeles Lakers players). He said that the first thing he often tells players is that “if they try to get in the zone, they can’t.” Instead, it involves an open alert attention, and the same applies to our social media lives.
Trying too hard, whether it is to make a basketball shot, gather more followers on Twitter, or increase sales of a product, creates tension that impedes our work. We cannot force these things, but we can invite them through a balanced, steady effort.
Lesson: Engage with a focused and open attention that invites instead of forces.
4. Know Where Your Attention is Most Needed
“When players practice what is known as mindfulness — paying attention to what’s actually happening — not only do they play better and win more, they also become more attuned to each other.” — Phil Jackson, who has won a record 10 NBA Championships as a coachHow many times have you been talking with someone, and the person’s cell phone rings, and without even knowing who it was or if it was important, the person immediately vacated your conversation to take the call? It was not even a choice. He or she was attentive to you for one second, and then poof! The person was mentally gone the next.
Of course, there are times to take calls and respond via text while with a friend, but if we are not careful in the age of social media, our attention can get bounced around like a ping pong ball, from this call, to that text message, to that tweet, such that by the end of the day we are exhausted. Mindfulness, or attention to the present moment, is lost. We spent our day “chasing,” letting others determine our focus, not choosing for ourselves where to put our attention and attending to the tasks most important to us.
Lesson: Ask yourself where your attention is most needed and direct it there.
Conclusion
In the coming years, the amount information at our disposal is only likely to increase. When Google recently launched Google Buzz, their team addressed the challenges of this information era, saying, “we want to present some tools and techniques to help you manage your attention better.” While this is partly a technological problem, it is also an internal and life balance problem.The challenge of our time is to live connected and use all the great social media available to us, while at the same time harness and direct our attention where it is most needed at any given time. After all, where we decide to put our attention is, essentially, how we choose to spend our life.
Please let us know in the comments: how do you stay balanced and focused amidst an active social media lifestyle?
Whether you’re using it on your phone or your desktop, Google Buzz is quickly becoming an interesting and popular way to share content with your Gmail friends. However, because it’s tied to Gmail, Google Buzz is also tied to your web browser. That can be fine for lots of instances, but what if you what if your primary Gmail account and the account you use Buzz with aren’t the same? What if you want to have Buzz act like more of a regular application than a browser tab?While we’re sure that plenty of Buzz-specific application clients are in the works, we’re going to show you how you can create your own Buzz Application for Windows, Mac or Linux. As a side benefit, you can utilize this technique with practically any web application out there!
The Rundown on SSBs (Site-Specific Browsers)
To create our stand-alone copy of Gmail (and by extension, Google Buzz), we’re going to create what is known as a site-specific browser (SSB). An SSB is a web browser instance that is created specifically for a certain website or web application. It has its own desktop shortcut and can appear as its own application.
Most SSBs will eschew more advanced browser features and add-ons (meaning you see the web page and not the toolbar and navigation components), keeping the focus just on a singular app or app suite. So why would anyone want something like this? Well, it makes it easy to keep a certain website or web app separate and distinguishable from other tabs. It also keeps the focus on just that app. Plus, if your main browser crashes or you accidentally close it, your SSB isn’t affected.
Choosing the Right Tool
There are a number of different programs for creating your own SSB.
Bubbles for Windows was one of the first general purpose SSB tools. It uses Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, meaning that it will display sites the same same way as Internet Explorer does on your PC. With Bubbles you can see your app from the system tray and get desktop notifications and drag and drop local files to your app.
Bubbles shares cookies with Internet Explorer, meaning that logging into two Gmail accounts at once is not the easiest thing to do. However, if that’s not what you need and you just want a good separate Gmail and Google Buzz client for Windows, you can download the free Bubbles for Gmail SSB.
Fluid for Mac is easy to use and customize, plus you can add in scripts and other additions if you want to get really geeky. It uses Safari’s WebKit rendering engine — so it’s fast — and you can take advantage of any of the Safari add-ons (like Agile Web Solutions’ 1Password), which makes it really slick.
However, like Bubbles, Fluid shares cookies with Safari for Mac. Again, this means that logging into multiple accounts of the same service is pretty much out of the question. We expect this to be fixed in the future, but as for right now, it’s not really an option. For developers that want to have customize an SSB and also distribute it to other users, check out the open source Fluidium project. Fluidium is in many ways the successor to Fluid.
Sadly, like Bubbles and Fluid for Mac, Google Chrome’s SSB tool still shares cookies with the Google Chrome browser. Again, if you want to login to the same service under multiple accounts, this isn’t the option for you. But it is a darn easy way to create an SSB.
Mozilla Prism is a standalone app or a Firefox extension that creates site-specific browsers that are rendered using Firefox’s Gecko engine. If you use the standalone app, you just need to enter in an address, an application name, and designate where you want the app to be located. If you use the Firefox Extension, you can turn any website into an SSB just by clicking Tools, “Convert to Website Application.”
Unlike Fluid, Chrome and Bubbles, Prism stores cookies for Prism apps separately from Firefox. This is fantastic for anyone with multiple accounts with the same service (like Gmail) who don’t like to shuffle between logins day in and day out.
For us, this is a killer feature — because one of the downsides of Google Buzz is that it is explicitly linked with a particular Gmail account. For teams or small businesses that want to use Buzz from a main account (like we do at Mashable), this is a way for multiple users to share an account, without having to give-up access to their personal mail or personal Buzz messages.
Creating a Google Buzz App in Prism
The process is pretty simple, but we’ll walk you through it step-by-step.
Step 1: Download Prism either as an extension or stand-alone app. Both options are virtually the same, so which one you use really just depends on your preference.
Step 2: Either double-click on the Prism application or go to Tools -> Convert Website to Application in Firefox.
Choose whether you want the app to be on your Desktop or in your Applications folder (or in the Start Menu for Windows) or both. You can choose to have a navigation window or not (we’d rather not have it), if you want status updates and notifications, and if you want to enable navigation keys.
Zandog and deviantART created a great PSD of the Google Buzz logo. I made just a couple of tiny modifications and resized it to 512×512 and saved it as a transparent PNG file. You can download it and use it for you own Buzz icon if you want something that will look nice in your task bar or Mac dock.
Here’s the image:
Step 3: Double-click on your Buzz icon to launch you new Buzz app.
That’s it! Now you can use Buzz in a stand-alone browser window without distractions and you can remain logged into a different Gmail account in Firefox, Chrome or Safari.
Make Other Sites into SSBs
You can use Prism (or Fluid, or Bubbles or Chrome) to create single-site browsers for other websites. Just follow the steps outlined above, replacing the Gmail URL with the site of your choice. Keep in mind that if you are dealing with a site that uses cookies for login info and you have or want to simultaneously access multiple accounts of the same service, Prism is the best option to use. Otherwise, it all comes down to a matter of preference!
Do you ever create site-specific browsers? What features would you like to see in a full-blown Buzz client? let us know!