Our first question comes from Irfana, who asks, "How can a freelancer perform deep work? The freelancer has to create his personal brand on LinkedIn. You know, suppose he's a social media manager, he needs to have a social media presence." Well, Irfana, I think this is an example of an important phenomenon to discuss briefly, which is single drop social media use.

And what I mean by single drop social media use is the mindset that if there is any social media use that is necessary in your life, so something professionally or what have you, there's, you know, job applicants and you have to check for questions on Facebook or something like that, that if there is any, a single drop of social media use in the pool that is your activity time, then you have to just unrestrictedly use social media from there on out.

And that's what I'm sensing in this question, that as a freelancer, there's some stuff you might want to do on LinkedIn. Maybe you have a LinkedIn Pulse-style newsletter and/or you have to keep up on inquiries from people or keep up with your network. I don't know exactly what it is, but in your mind that small amount of mandated use means, I guess I just have to be on social media all the time.

And that's not the case. In fact, this would be the challenge I would give you. Let us say I said, here's the new law under a penalty of $100,000 fine. You are only allowed to be logged into LinkedIn for 20 minutes once a week. I bet you would be fine.

I bet you would be fine. What would happen if that was the law? Well, first of all, if you were posting content on LinkedIn, you would just write it elsewhere. And during that 20 minutes, you would post, you would make it weekly. If there were requests coming in or you wanted to do some networking, just during that 20 minutes, you would answer the request and you would maybe do some pokes.

Maybe you would update your profile to somehow say, I do LinkedIn messages on Fridays or whatever day you do it. Maybe you'd miss a couple things or a couple of people would be annoyed that you were slow getting back into them, but who cares, right? This is a numbers game.

It's just over time being on there may be surfaces the occasional opportunity. So you would be absolutely fine in 20 minutes once a week, which is a negligible footprint. This is the type of exercise I want people to do when they think about unavoidable social media use. What if I was only doing this for a very small amount of time, quite infrequently?

Could I really make that work? Would I get most of the value? And I think in most cases, the answer would be yes. So do not allow the single drop of social media requirement in your life be the instigating force that gets you to then endlessly lose yourself into those distractions.

(upbeat music)