Is the Internet Killing Your Productivity?
Maybe you remember life before the internet… but maybe you don’t! For entrepreneurs (and everyone else) the internet can help or harm your productivity. And fortunately, there are things you can do to mitigate the harms.
The internet giveth…
Remember when you had to feed twenty or so “floppy” disks into your computer in order to install a program on it? Pepperidge Farm remembers (and so do I.) If you never had to sit through that hours-long process, you might not be as thankful to have programs you can download in a couple of minutes!
As a business owner, you can find competitors pretty easily and take a look at their website, marketing, and offers. Of course, the reverse is true as well.
If you’re a solopreneur, you can use app-based services instead of hiring someone for each function: customer relationship manager, bookkeeper, answering service, even marketing. And if you do want to hire someone, in addition to referrals you can employ online hiring platforms or ask colleagues on “social” media.
Your clients don’t have to live in your town or geographically near you. You can live wherever you want and still connect with friends, family, clients, and vendors. Face-to-face meetings across hundreds or thousands of miles are possible through the internet.
Obviously there are more benefits of the internet, but these examples directly impact productivity.
…and the internet taketh away
The internet is now a huge time-waster if you’re not careful. Especially on “social” media platforms, which have been designed exactly like casinos to keep you on the platform (in the casino) so the platform’s owner can bank huge money from advertisers.
The “social” media feed is where attention goes to die.
Back in my day (when we walked to school in the snow uphill both ways) it was all text-based, because telephone landlines couldn’t handle graphics. This was before the world wide web, when there was no standard url and there was a lot of educational information.
Last century (giggle) when we socialized on the internet, it was through chat rooms often called bulletin boards. A lot of the more “controversial” topics were on alt boards, so you’d go to, say, alt.atheism to type to whichever bunch of atheists happened to be in the chat room at the same time.
There were no ads on the internet at first; those came later. Therefore, we didn’t have popups capturing our attention all the time, and we were able to still have conversations.
Back then we all still watched pretty much the same stuff on TV, so we all had the same frame of reference. Now there’s clickbait that’s designed to engage you and your personal biases, to keep you on the platform long enough to get some serious ad money.
We’ve lost that common frame of reference because it’s far more profitable for the platforms to make us angry and throw us red meat (of whatever variety your previous browsing history has informed them you like or at least respond to).
Now there are no gatekeepers, which early internet nerds welcomed as democratizing information. Unfortunately, though there was a brief period when that was the case, now there are a whole bunch of cranks and bots specializing in misinformation and disinformation. Since we have no gatekeepers, it can be a lot harder to find honest information sources.
Using the internet to promote productivity
You may not like all these suggestions, but I can guarantee that if you follow them you will face far fewer interruptions and distractions while you’re trying to work.
If you want to be productive and accomplish your work without spending hours and hours in the office, you need fewer distractions.
No “social” media on your phone – if you sell online, make sure the comments/messages feed into your system instead of you having to on the platform and pull them yourself.
Turn off “social” notifications and news notifications – news is happening all across the planet every single second of every single day, and you can’t do anything about most of it. You might have notifications on for select topics that are related to your business or that you’re interested in, but you don’t need to know about every single thing that’s happening.
Do not create with AI – first of all, by the time you’ve figured out the prompt that gives you exactly what you want, have massaged it to sound like you, and have checked for any errors because AI is known to confabulate sources, references, and ideas as part of how it works, you could already have created the thing.
More importantly, if you stop thinking, you will lose the ability to think. At that point you are subject to every grifter and con artist imaginable, because you can’t think critically any more and you won’t know who to trust.
So if you need to use AI (and no one does), use it after you have already done your thinking.
Recap (tl;dr)
The internet has been a huge benefit to a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs. However, there is also a significant downside. Being effective means that you are aware of how it can harm you and what to do to mitigate those harms.
Still having a hard time being effective in your business? Click here for your free consultation to see how I can help you work smarter instead of harder.