When is TMI Too Much Information?

. . . When the amount of time spent managing the various professional, social, and other types of networking services outstrips the time needed to support our clients and build up our business _with clients_.

Given the nature of our business, that is the speed at which new things are developed and tossed out onto the Internet and the rate we adopt those new things, we need to be very mindful we don’t snowball ourselves into some sort of Technology ADD (Wikipedia link to ADD definition).

The further result of that snowball effect is the loss of touch with our business purpose which is to supply and support solutions to our clients that pay the bills, and/or to support our fellow IT Business folks that also pay the bills.

It is time to stop and think about all of those professional and social network profiles that we have left behind because we just do not have enough time in the day to manage all of them. TADD (Technology ADD), may be demonstrated by the number of profile trails we leave behind us as we move from one networking mechanism to the next.

We specifically need to evaluate how much time in a week that we put into a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page or pages, a LinkedIn profile, or other networking medium.

Then, we need to be honest about them all and ask ourselves if the time we put into each is justified.

We also need to be mindful if the time we put into networking compromises our business, our family life, or even our health.

Justifying something can be really easy for us, it is the honesty required to _evaluate and let go of_ what we have justified that can be really difficult.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer