Get The Rest of Your Life Back—Toss the Tech Tools

As a web entrepreneur, I think about the time I spend in front of a computer constantly. How much is too much? And when should I call it quits to enjoy what I love so much more – real social interaction?

Becoming absorbed by technology is inevitable in most business environments. From the Fortune 500 to local Mom and Pops, everyone is trying to do their work faster and cheaper. And of course, technology is the easy answer.

Unfortunately, overuse of technology has its side effects. Even if you see these effects as minimal, just ignoring them is irresponsible. Here's why.

Health Risks

A couple weeks ago, The New York Times published an article citing recent tragedies related to the overuse of technology. Two bloggers recently passed away. And another blogger, Om Malik, of GigaOM fame, suffered (but survived) a heart attack last December.

There's no proof that these tragedies were in any way directly related to their work, but it really makes me think. What kind of physical toll is an all-day-all-night laptop binge having on my body? As if binge drinking and secondhand smoke at the bar weren't enough.

As someone who interacts with most business connections online, I'm prone to sitting in a chair for way too long. So if you're like me, do yourself a favor and stand up.

I'm not going to be the guy who tells you to go to the gym and turn your life around. Just get up, walk around and get your blood flowing a little bit. It'll make a huge difference.

The Social Aspects of Work

Today I dropped by the post office. I walked in and instead of going up to a clerk at the front desk I was invited by one of the postal agents to try their new automated mailing technology.

A kind old lady showed me how to use the new technology. We joked about the crappy weather here in Madison and then I left with a smile on my face. It was great. But as I left, my mood shifted entirely. This lady was teaching me to interact with her replacement.

Before you get all depressed, I can certainly tell you that this lady was looking forward to her retirement. The point here is that there are these small, valuable things we take for granted, like meeting someone new every day. But when those things are replaced by technology, I can't see the world being a happier place.

Take a moment today and appreciate the people who serve you. Not that this will stop companies from trying to boost productivity, but at least it'll give you a chance to see what I'm talking about.

Our Own Mentality

Take mental health breaks every day. Me, I have my dog. I take him to the park, he runs around, I try to keep up, and then I go back to work. Your mental health break can be anything you want. Try riding a bike or something. I come up with great ideas when I ride my bike.

The idea is to get away from the technology that can make life more artificial, not get more consumed by it. And although surfing the web can be very stimulating, your brain needs balance.

My favorite example of this is doing redesigns on Brazen Careerist. By the end of the night, our minds are so fatigued, eyes completely glazed over, that we don't even speak to each other. I can't even answer a simple question without "Huh?"

Sure, these types of nights are the nature of our business, but only maybe every other week, at the most. Someone who lives this every day likely has some risky mental and physical health. Try something non-techy on a regular basis and get the rest of your life back that you've maybe forgotten about and shouldn't be missing.

Pre-Internet Days Shed Light on E-mail Etiquette

Life before electronic communication is a foggy memory for the oldest millennials. For the youngest members of Generation Y it's basically an incomprehensible reality. E-mail has been a routine part of communication for most millennials.

But despite its familiarity, e-mail blunders are all too common. There are a number of books and articles that have been written to help people communicate more effectively over e-mail (in fact, I've linked to one such item at the end of this post).

But navigating the immediacy and accessibility that e-mail offers is tricky. This is particularly true for people who have little awareness of what communication was like before such efficient means existed, and this obliviousness can lead to trouble in the workplace.

Although most e-mail oversights turn out to be little more than an embarrassing faux pas, serious electronic misconduct can lead to an employee's dismissal. A study from the ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association found that 25 percent of surveyed employers have fired an employee for violating e-mail policy, according to an article about dismissals related to e-mail issues.

For millennials, e-mail problems can first crop up in college. "To: Professor @ University .edu Subject: Why It's All About Me," a 2006 New York Times article examined how the issue plays out on campus. According to the article, professors complain that "students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages — from 10 a week to 10 after every class — that are too informal or downright inappropriate." Although students' experience in college might help them improve some aspects of their e-mail etiquette, the mistakes don't magically disappear after they leave the Ivory Tower.

Millennials can learn a lot about appropriate electronic conduct by consulting older coworkers who have a greater awareness about how e-mail has changed communication in the office. Understanding the context can make for more effective communication.

Rick Holton, 56 — the founder of Holton, a communications consulting company — says that apart from speeding up the process of communication in business, e-mail and other tools have made marketing cheaper and easier and have contributed to work-life balance because it makes working from home a lot easier. But it's important to be aware of the drawbacks.

"E-mail has reduced the amount of personal contact we get… It can keep us out of the loop at the companies we work for, and managers can forget who we are if they never see us. Electronic communication also contributes to America's growing solipsism. Baby boomers are self-absorbed, no question, but their children (and now grandchildren) are far worse, all of which may have some troubling implications for American society," Holton says.

"Young people who have grown up with electronic communications should learn that communication isn't in the volume, it's in the content," according to Holton. He adds, "…the volume of information is far less important than having it be the right information."

Holton recommends considering what your communication goals are and then determining what your approach should be. Audience is important too. "Many older people don't care much for e-mail, even if they have access to it. Businesspeople in the South, I've often found, send handwritten thank you notes and expect to get handwritten notes in return," he says.

Holton's six tips for writing more effective business e-mails are available here. Author Judith Kallos operates the Business E-mail Etiquette blog, which has some great posts about things to be aware of when using e-mail at work.

Millennials in the Newsroom

As millennials come of age, they're infiltrating the work force in all areas and all industries. Many, like me, are becoming journalists. And some, like me, are continually re-evaluating this career decision. While I think you can find recovering journalists in almost every generation (I've chatted with way too many people who seem to have concluded that being a journalist was more appealing on paper than in practice), there are some unique reasons why the news room can be a toxic place for millennials. At the same time, the digitalization of news is providing opportunities that mesh really well with the Gen Y mentality.

Keen observers of Gen Y know that this generation craves work-life balance. For us, sacrificing a personal life to climb the ranks at work isn't a reasonable trade-off. We want jobs that can accommodate life, not a life that has to accommodate the job – an aspiration that is often at odds with the status quo in many work places. It is an especially lofty goal when it comes to journalism, a career that often requires late hours and weekend work to meet deadlines.

Predictably, millennials in journalism aren't happy about those long hours. According to a 2005 Poynter survey, journalists between 20 and 34 years old were most likely to say they had considered leaving journalism because of work-life balance issues. And newsroom vets generally aren't getting it. Danna Walker, an adjunct journalism professor at American University who also works as an editor and producer at CBS, says that "the older generation didn't know what to think" when millennials first showed up in newsrooms. "The assumption is that millennials aren't as willing to pay their dues," she says. In fact, the whole "pay your dues" mentality is "worn out," according to Bea Fields, author of "Millennial Leaders." Control tactics do nothing to attract and retain Gen Y employees, as Fields explains over at Y Blog.

Newsrooms also rarely meet Gen Y's mentorship and training expectations. A young journalist recently submitted a question to "Ask the Recruiter" columnist Joe Grimm, a well-know recruitment and development editor for the Detroit Free Press. The recent graduate wrote that he got "minimal feedback" from the editors at his paper, leaving him with "no idea" whether he was doing a good job or a bad job. "If misery loves company, you have plenty of both," Grimm writes in response, citing a survey that found that lack of training is the number one complaint that journalists have about the profession.

But millennials aren't totally doomed to an otherwise unhappy or non-existent future in journalism. The Internet and multimedia news can add a "wonderful dynamic" to newsrooms, says Jill Geisler, a journalism leadership and management specialist at Poynter. Young journalists with technical skills are in big demand to staff news Web sites. As a result, many new hires are commanding respect from day one because they're often the only person in the newsroom with the multimedia know-how to perform certain tasks. "As editors realize they need new approaches and people with new media skills, younger folks are becoming more valued," Walker writes in an e-mail. A Gen Y friend who works for NBC in Washington, D.C. tells me that she and some of her other colleagues are sought after by their older newsroom counterparts who are hoping that the millennials can teach them a thing or two about the computer programs they learned in journalism school. In many situations, multimedia is not only allowing Gen Yers to get a foot in the door, but it's immediately positioning them in roles where they are taken seriously from the start.

In addition, the expansion of online news is also catering to Gen Y's job-hopping tendencies. New positions are popping up in many companies that are launching or expanding Web sites to complement print work. Job-hopping within the industry is common, observes Meg Martin, a multimedia producer for the Roanoke Times. "There's a lot of crossover and a lot of news organizations are encouraging people to explore different positions," Martin says.

The news industry is facing a moment of significant challenges and prospects in terms of recruitment of Gen Y journalists. Will digital news be journalism's proverbial "knight in shining armor" when it comes to recruiting millennials and then retaining them for longer than five minutes? Could it set journalism apart from other industries in the quest to adapt to Gen Y? The answer will certainly depend on how individual newsrooms resolve work-life balance concerns, training needs and other issues that matter to millennials. But for me and the thousands of other millennials with notoriously high student loan payments, the bottom line might just end up getting the largest say.

Weak Ties and Strong Friendships

One of the most difficult things I've faced since graduating college is keeping up with my friends. You would think that because of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Blogs, Twitter and all the other fancy social networking tools out there, staying in touch would be easy. And I'm sure it is much easier than it was in the past.

However, a yearly happy birthday wish on a friend's Facebook wall, or following your friends' daily lives through their blogs and Twitter updates, is a far cry from maintaining a friendship. Real friendships start because of a connection between you and another human being, maintaining those friendships requires putting in the effort to preserve that connection.

What social networks have created is a plethora of weak interpersonal ties. Wikipedia says,

More novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.

Social networks are great, as you can see from the above definition; they're actually a breeding ground for the creation of weak ties. These networks give the user the ability to create hundreds or thousands of weak ties, all transmitting novel information through their respective networks.

But these networks also make it very easy to decrease the number of strong ties or actual friends that each of us has. When we all leave college and move to different parts of the country, we're no longer moving in the same familiar circles. Without a conscious effort, it's very easy for old best friends become weak tied, online acquaintances.

Everyone should embrace new technology and social networks to create as many weak ties as possible. Having a million online acquaintances allows you to embrace the diversity that exists in the world and provides the connections you need to advance anywhere you want in your career. But the way I see it, a thousand weak ties cannot replace the connection that comes from one strong tie.

So, pick up the phone and have a heart to heart with your best friend from college, log into Gmail and start a conversation with your High School buddy, or send a long email to your ex girlfriend or boyfriend (assuming he/she doesn't hate you).

I'm going to take my own advice and do the same, because other than family, I can't think of one thing more important than a strong tie and a solid friendship.

We all work for Facebook

According to The New York Times, 1,500 Facebook users have decided to take matters into their own hands and run ads on their personal Facebook pages. Weblo, an ad network that sells ads onto people's blogs and social networking profile pages is helping people run these ads.

Truthfully, I'm not surprised. This seems like the next logical step in social networking. People spend hours, days and even weeks updating their profiles, adding pictures, searching their friend's pages, etc. All of this sharing of personal information is what makes Facebook, Facebook.

Zuckerberg and his team created the shell, the users created the content, and now Facebook is valued at $15 billion. It makes total sense that users should be compensated in some way.

The fact of the matter is we all work for Facebook. There's no contract, and we're not employees, but that $15 billion valuation has not only come from the thousands of hours put in by Facebook employees, but by the millions of hours put in by Facebook users.

It seems that the biggest issue Facebook faces is determining how to capitalize on all of the personal information they have. Last month's Beacon program was greeted with some serious backlash. Zuckerberg eventually trashed the original program and wrote an apology blog post.

However, they're obviously on to something. I have no problem promoting a product or service if I believe in it. Look at the jobs page of Employee Evolution for example. We had no contact with The Motley Fool, Best Buy or W.L. Gore, yet we still advised all of our readers to apply to those companies. I would have no problem telling my friends on Facebook that my new pair of Nikes are amazing and everyone should buy a pair.

Our generation grew up in an age of corporate branding like no other. Just look at college football, we've got the Allstate National Championship game, The AT&T Cotton Bowl and The AutoZone Liberty Bowl. I see these names and it doesn't bother me at all, that's just the way things are. But I'm fully conscious of the money and branding involved on both sides.

Thanks to Myspace, Facebook and blogging, we're entering the age of personal branding, and there is money to be made on all sides. Facebook can undoubtedly stay enormously wealthy by selling access to millions of people. Companies can continue to sell ads to boost sales and increase brand awareness. But what hasn't been accounted for is the generation of entrepreneurs that Facebook has helped create who will not and should not sit back and let the corporations make all the money.

As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is totally right to think that young people will not mind advertising brands to their friends, but they're wrong to think that we won't start demanding a cut.