So yesterday I talked about how all signs pointed in a positive direction during the one-hundred day social meida blackout. Today, I’m going to bring up something I saw in action: the need to prioritize by value.

When you’re working in a creative field, it’s not like being on an assembly line. You don’t constantly produce every minute you’re in front of your computer. Some writers, like myself, often research, plot and think without ever touching our fingers to the keyboard. Others are different. When I do write, I write very quickly and a lot all at once. Even then, I don’t write the same way for every project all the time. Sometimes I have to change location. Sometimes there’s a broken plot thread that I have to address, so I move on to another story in the meantime.

Bringing this back around to the topic at hand, after being off of social media for so long, I wound up restructuring my time without even realizing it. I was, in a sense, performing the same consulting tasks I’ve done for other people based on the value or the activity’s pay-off — financial, emotional, etc. — to myself.

In this way, when I got back online, I was able to manage not only how much time I spent on it, but whether or not I could learn how to use Google+ or care about the latest “fail” or “trend.” That information is still valuable — especially for content creators that rely on that information to be relevant. While some trends are important to me, the micro-trends that happen hourly or daily are “here today, gone tomorrow.” Since I am not writing about trends, if I come across them I take them into account. If I don’t? I’m not missing anything.

Although I’ve been writing from my perspective, I recognize you’ll have a different idea about all of this than I will.Check out an article on ApexBookCompany.com called: “Beaten to death on the social network.” It’s a different perspective on this, but I think you’ll find it interesting.