Adzerk Team Blog

Who cares what your Klout score is, or where you checked in for lunch, or that you are the mayor of Chubby’s Tacos…..  Is it important?  Is it a healthy and productive use of technology?  Or more importantly  is this a productive use of your time?  I am more interested in knowing if you are a good parent, spouse, employer, employee, sibling, neighbor, friend… Are you “wasting” your time productively? 

Don’t get me wrong, advancements in technology have led to significant leaps in productivity.  We have numerous examples that we can point to right here at Adzerk where technology makes us better/faster/smarter at what we do.   Those that do not embrace technology will quickly be left behind.  If you still carry around a paper calendar, you may fall into this category.  And there are other reasons to embrace technology besides just productivity.  At a recent dinner party, one of the moms said that her teenage son did not have a facebook page.  This comment received the reaction that you might expect: “Yea,… right!”.  One quick check on facebook revealed that mom was wrong and indeed her son did have a facebook account and was quite active.  Her fear of technology had impacted her awareness of with whom and how her son was communicating.   It is not quite adapt or die, but it might be close.  

On the flip side, there are certainly those that have taken adoption to the extreme, and probably to the point of losing some of these productivity gains.  If you are on social media at all, you have come across these “Super” adopters.  They check their Klout score on a daily basis and are actually annoyed when they find someone with a higher score,  they check in when they wake up and continue checking in until they close their eyes to go to bed.  Do you really care where your wife’s brother’s girlfriend’s aunt ate lunch today?  The noise of social media can be overwhelming at times.  When 95% of the information coming from a “friend”, colleague or application is irrelevant or uninteresting, it is probably time to turn them off.  The  time spent wading through the noise does not justify the 5% that might be interesting or of some value.  At some point we need to ask who is in control; you or the cool new app.  If you are standing out in the rain just to take a picture of a restaurant where you want to post to your Path, if you are getting ready for a business meeting and you ask your host to hang on for a minute while I check in, or if you break in to a sweat if you don’t have your smart phone in hand, you may not be in control.

At Adzerk, productivity rules.  It is important to create boundaries around when to use and when to put away the gadgets/apps. This applies to work as well as personal life.  Meals, meetings, and heads-down productive work time should be as free from the constant interruption that some of our technology presents.  For you late adopters, maybe 2012 is the year for an electronic calendar.  For those of us who get the shakes, if we start to lose Klout, lets look up from our devices and have a meaningful conversation with the people that are important to us.