I recently received this tweet from Skellie, one of my favorite idea sources:
Productivity in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.
So–I promptly threw out my entire library of David Allen and Stephen Covey books, closed my Nozbe account, and trashed my Pomodoro.
Not really. But I do recognize that if I followed the 11-word formula faithfully, I would resolve a lot of productivity problems. And happily, this thought fit right in with a post I’d been planning on how to avoid the social media time trap. Then I got a tweet about JobDeck, and everything fell into place!
TweetDeck is just one of the several good tools available for managing Twitter, but it’s the one I know best. And it’s also the one that recently rolled out a special version for job-seekers. JobDeck is essentially TweetDeck enhanced with built-in job search functionality, a special column for recruiting news, and a desklike appearance. The New York Times Technology section offers a nice summary of the product.
In terms of productivity—having a dashboard like TweetDeck, where you can filter and organize many Twitter streams (as well as input from Facebook and LinkedIn), is a huge help if you really want to be involved in social media. But TweetDeck can also increase the seduction factor by making you aware of just how much is going on in the Twitterverse every minute. So you might want to browse Tim Ferriss’s article How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You—5 Tips. One tip (“Set alerts or blocks on Twitter usage”) discusses productivity aids like RescueTime. I’m about to test-drive RescueTime and will review if it’s interesting.
I’m also trying out Mr.Tweet. Basically, Mr.Tweet looks at your own followers/followees and recommends other Twitterers you might want to consider. So far, Mr.Tweet has made some interesting suggestions—and the excellent interface shows how each one was derived, as well as providing individual profiles that include Twitter statistics and sample tweets. It’s free, and worth a look, especially if you have a focused Twitter agenda and would like to quickly find high-value tweeters.
A final thought about Twitter and productivity. I was a late adopter of Twitter, and I’m still figuring out how best to use it. One key (for me anyway) has been finding people whose tweets alert me to things I want to know about. Getting the most out of Twitter requires practice, but you can learn to scan various streams quickly and pick out just what’s relevant or intriguing, while letting the rest go by.
That’s from the perspective of using Twitter as an information source. Using Twitter as a search tool has a whole different set of considerations, and there is not a better overview than Boolean Blackbelt’s How to Search Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting.
Cynthia Giles has followed a serpentine career path from academia to publishing to marketing and design to information technology and corporate communications. There’s plenty of detail about this journey at www.cynthiagiles.com, but briefly--the common theme has been ideas, and how to present them effectively. Along the way, she became an accidental expert on data warehousing and business intelligence, and for the past ten years she has combined corporate contracting with an independent consulting practice that focuses on marketing strategy for smaller businesses and non-profits.
Having spent quite a bit of time looking for work, and anywhere from two weeks to two years inside a wide variety of American companies—she has given much thought to what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to creating a great employment fit.
