trishussey
on
Yeah I really, really like Google+. You can see from my Google+ profile that I spend a good bit of time there posting, commenting, and sharing. This also means that I spend a good bit of time there. Now the question is, how can you spend quality time on G+ and not have it become a giant time suck in your day. Well, I have 5 ways to help you do this and maybe if I write them down, I can help myself too!
First thing to know about Google+ is, like all social networks and information portals, you get what you give. So if you don’t spend any time there, don’t post anything (share, comment, +1), or cultivate circles of people who make Google+ valuable for you—you’re not going to reap any benefits from G+ and the benefits are real, believe me. Okay, so how do you keep from being sucked into G+ (to the expense of work, life, etc). Here are five ways:
- 1. Cultivate focused circles of people to follow, and stay in that stream most of the time. Yeah, I have a lot of people in my whole stream, but remember I’m an info junkie, I’m used to this kind of stuff and know how to mentally filter.
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2. Turn off email (and phone) notifications. I turned off notifications for when people added me to their circles, I still get emails for comments on my posts or posts I’ve left comments on, but just cutting out circles cut out a lot of “oh let me check that…” temptation.
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3. Mute posts. I love to leave comments on my friends’ posts. However some of my friends are rather popular folks so sometimes their posts can get a little out of hand. So after I while I mute the post so I don’t keep hearing about it. When do I mute? Either when the post is becoming a distraction or the new comments have started to become redundant.
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4. Use some G+ extensions for Chrome. The first of the “killer” extensions was G+me and this brilliant extension collapses all the post threads while still letting you see a live comment count. To add more oomph try Google+ Ultimate for some great layout enhancements and Plus Minus for features like being able to show/hide streams with a click. Plus Minus and G+me have a couple over lapped features (collapsible posts in particular), so I found you need to add Plus Minus, refresh, turn off collapsible posts in Plus Minus, refresh then install G+me. It also works to install then enable and disable them in order, but it’s important to start with Plus Minus I found.
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5. Just close the window/tab. Yeah I know. Just step away from Google+ for a while. I’ve try to “make it part of my routine” and spend an hour on G+ then move on … yeah that doesn’t work. If you really want to get things done, sometimes you just have to close Google+, Twitter, Facebook, even email and just get stuff done.
That’s all I got. I love the level of posts, interaction, and general “interestingness” of G+, but these blog posts don’t write themselves so even folks like me have to tune out sometimes.
Sometimes.
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