I like my home office. The desk, the bookcases, the wide window looking out to the giant spruce trees. I’m grateful for all of it. However, if there’s one thing that I do miss about working at an outside office, it’s the impromptu interactions with colleagues, or what I call Tiny Kitchen Moments (TKM). Those random run-ins with people – like “Art Director Chick” who sits on the other side of the office or “Trying to Bring Suspenders Back Guy” from the photo department – while you’re all in the small, office kitchen getting water or stuffing more Tupperware into the semi-gross fridge. It’s there that one could slip into a conversation about anything from the humdrum (Cold out there, right?) to the more intricate and interesting (But was Walter White dreaming all along, though?). Often, these talks would stretch out as we both slowly walk along the halls back to our respective cubes and corners.

Tiny Kitchen Moments were great for breaking up the workday and giving my loaded brain a breather. Now, working from home, by myself and for myself, I don’t have the TKM perk … but I do have social media. Thanks to social media, I have a water cooler right at my fingertips, plus changing out of running tights is totally optional. Perfect solution, right? Well, right-ish. The far-reaching, never-ending, talk about everything and anything on social media is the best thing and the worst thing about it.

It all starts out so simply as I take a writing break by checking things out on Facebook. After handing out a few FB “Likes,” I head over to Twitter to read a long profile on Nobel prize winner Alice Munro and her advice on writing a great story, then off to a post about the grown-up lure of Young Adult novels, which sends me on a tangent about the prevalence of supernaturals in YA books, which means – obviously – catching up on my TV vampire boyfriend (yes!) and what actress he may or may not be dating after his shocker divorce, and that takes me to a new chart from Pew Studies showing that dads spend an extra three hours every week chillin’ watching TV while moms are tending to the young’uns. And then click, retweet, click, click, click: I’m watching a slideshow of the BEST pictures of a baby pygmy hippo kissing strangers’ noses. Whuuuttt. How did you arrive here, Blades? This is not quality TKM. Or maybe it is. I mean, truth told, those chance meet-ups with coworkers in the kitchen and corridors weren’t all winners. There was definitely a bit of a useless, Grumpy Cat element to those face-to-face chats too. Plus, those real life TKMs didn’t have gifs. What is anything without a gif?!

Although the online water cooler might help me feel connected, the problem is figuring out how to back away from that pull. In a traditional workspace, you can close your office door or avoid the kitchen because you need to concentrate. But with social media, those sidebar chats will continue well past the end of the workday, and you can find yourself getting distracted constantly, checking your timelines and notifications every half-minute, and falling down the rabbit hole of trends, memes and six-second videos. Not productive, clearly.

Right now, I’m getting my tech balance back, making clearer choices and setting cut-offs around how long I spend online getting my virtual TKMs. For example, recently I’ve been shutting down all browsers after my allotted social media time (20 minutes), using Focus View when writing in Word, and keeping my iPhone downstairs in the kitchen. It’s been good, and I can see my discipline strengthening daily. Now, figuring out how to fight off the addictive magnet otherwise known as “Words With Friends.” But, it’s crawl before walk, yes?

Posted on 10/18/2013

Written by Nicole Blades

Nicole Blades is an author, journalist and storyteller. She’s also the mother of perhaps the most delightful little boy on this spinning globe. Read more from her on Ms. Mary Mack.com, a blog that aims to bring compassion and common sense back to parenthood.

Comments

comments