social media

Can we just talk about social media for a minute? There are times when I just love it. I love sharing funny things my kids do, I love sharing a good meal that I made or even a fun project I'm working on. But there are also times that it takes my attention away from what's more important. Isn't it crazy the things that distract us during the day?

If you read my last post or my about me, you know that I worked at a coffee shop for 7 years, managing for 5 of those years. In our manager meetings the one thing that was a consistent topic was cell phones. It was a constant battle to get employees to put them away. There's just no need for it the work place. You are there getting paid to do a job. That is engaging with customers and completing  tasks. Plus lets talk about how dirty they are? These devices get taken EVERYWHERE with us. To the bathroom, they get carried in our pockets, they get set random places. They are covered in germs and it's a customer service job. You are handling peoples food. And as a customer, have you ever gone into a restaurant or a retail place and have seen an employee on their cell phone texting? It's a total turn off. Its rude and you instantly feel like whatever they are doing on it must be more important than you are. 

Now, lets take our jobs as moms. What if we looked at it just like that? Our kids are our jobs. Remember how you felt when you were a customer and walked into a place where you were blatantly ignored? GUITLY. I am totally guilty of putting my kids on the back burner sometimes. I will pick up my phone to check something and get totally sucked into this vortex of social media. 10, 20, 30 minutes will go by and I don't even realize it. Is is that we long for adult interaction during the day? Somedays I totally feel like that way. I feel validated in some weird way by the amount of likes I get on a picture I post. But sometimes I totally let my kids down. I have so many awesome memories as a kid but do you want to know what's not in my memory? My parents sitting on their cellphones. And I don't want that to be my kids memories of me. 

So how do we fix that. My kids are certainly more important to me than social media. Maybe we set hours where we put on away our phones. Where we are totally being intentional with our time as a mom or as parents. Maybe we delete the facebook app or the instagram app on our phone so there isn't that distraction, or just turn the notification off. I'm not saying I have all the answers but when I look back at the time as a manager and I see how much more productive my employees were when they didn't have the distraction it makes me realize how much more productive I could be in my role at home.