Keeping Social Media from taking over your writing life

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When you go to sleep, do you dream in Tweets or Plurks? Do you find yourself talking in sentences that would easily fit within a 140 character limitation?  Does your manuscript have a fine layer of newly accumulated dust?  If you said yes to any of these and you participate in social media, then you’re already addicted.

The good news is you don’t have to quit.  But you do need to curb your micro-blogging appetite.  Here are a some things you can do to hold back the monster:

• Use social media to keep track of your output: There is no better way to keep you from spending all your time on social networking sites than to sending out status messages indicating what little writing you’ve done.  Guilt can be an excellent tool if used correctly.
• Reward yourself with social breaks: If you work at home, the temptation to spend your entire day on social networking sites is incredible.  To mitigate this, give yourself 15 minute social breaks to go online and gab with your friends.  Keep an egg timer or watch with a chronograph handy to track your break time between pages.
• Set a writing schedule: 15 minutes not enough?  Then set a schedule that you will do nothing but write during.  Once you’re finished, you’re free to do what you want.
• Set a daily writing goal: Worried if you set a scheduled writing time you’ll end up doing nothing anyhow just so you can get back to social networking?  Set yourself a daily goal, whether it is words, pages or chapters.  If you don’t meet your goal, you don’t get to play.

The above tricks and tips will help you keep on target, but sometimes the best thing you can do is have an interesting project to write so you have a stronger desire to write it rather than whittle your life away 140 characters at a time.