There is a saying that if you don’t control your own time someone will control it for you. While I wholly believe in this saying I am not going to try and give you some new time management strategy. There are plenty of experts out there who can do that way better than I can.
What I would like to do is discuss another tool we all use. LinkedIn. While looking at LinkedIn the other day I was “surprised” by how my feed has been taken over by posts I identified with. I was only surprised by this because it was a change from what I had seen recently. And what I had seen recently was NOT great.
I had allowed my LinkedIn to get out of control. It was started when I felt that in order to best leverage the social network I had to have the widest net possible. So I connected with everyone that came my way. I accepted invites from people I didn’t know. I followed groups I only had a minor (if even that) connection or interest in. That followed, years later, with a supervisor in a job asking me to use my profile for outreach for the company. I happily agreed. What could possibly go wrong!
Well it turns out a lot. I won’t get into the specifics here but what ended up happening what I went from just less than 1000 connections made up of, mostly, people I either knew directly or had some sort of professional connection with to nearly double that number. The problem was that I had no relationship to the nearly 1000 new connections I had. And that was a problem.
It took me a while to realize this was an issue. What finally turned the light bulb on for me is when I reached out to a contact who I shared with someone I was trying to network with. “Hey how well do you know so and so and could you connect us?” The reply I received was something along the of, “I have no idea who that is, sorry!”
After a couple more of these and someone doing the same to me I realized something was wrong. I realized I wasn’t in control of my professional network anymore. Imagine if you had thousands of contacts but you couldn’t easily reach out to half of them and say “Hey John, I have a colleague who is interested in your company for role ‘x’ would you mind chatting with them”? Because if you did they would respond with “I’m sorry, where do we know each other from?”
So, control your LinkedIn. If you can’t honestly tell yourself that you could reach out to each and every connection and they would not only know you but be willing to help you then maybe you should take a step back and ask yourself “why”.
So what did I do? Well, I am slowly cleaning up my connections. If I don’t know the person I am connected with (sorry to the car dealership owner in South Dakota) I remove and unfollow them. It sounds harsh but what it has done is completely transform my feed. I now get more meaningful content rather than stories and articles that I mindlessly scroll through.
In the end your LinkedIn can be whatever you want it to be. If you have a specific reason to be a power networker then by all means do it, but for a moment I would invite you to look at how you leverage LinkedIn and is having more connections or quality connections better?