International Law

Here I am consuming all sorts of media at 9:20pm on a Saturday night - I've just finished watching The Devil Wears Prada on Foxtel (I'm not really sure why), I'm reading my email, checking my RSS feeds and have a dozen tabs open in Firefox, and all the while I'm logged into Facebook ... 

Then I read this on Businesspundit (my emphasis):

You can learn a lot by talking to the elderly. One thing you typically find is that they do have common regrets ... They wish they had taken better care of themselves, saved more money, spent more time with friends and family, and done more to achieve some of their goals. They never wish they had watched more television.

I'm willing to bet that as you look back on 2007, there are some things you didn't achieve that you wanted to. I'm willing to bet that you aren't sitting around wishing you spent more time on Facebook. But I bet there are days that you sat down intending to spend 20 minutes and ended up wasting 2 hours on it, or on some other Web 2.0 site.

Human beings are suffering from a values gap between the short-term and long-term. We have long-term goals, but short-term attention spans. Sometimes we forget that getting a PhD, making a million dollars, competing in the Olympics, running a marathon, mastering a hobby, or whatever it is that we want to achieve in life is basically accomplished by sacrificing lots of the short-term to reach our goals in the long-term.

With all this talk about the social media revolution and how great it all is, I can't help but wonder if it's what we really want. Does facebook really help us achieve our long-term goals? Or is it really just taking advantage of our short-term reward systems and sucking us down a path of wasted time? I'm not saying you should work on your goals 24/7 and never relax, I'm just guess that most of you have be sucked into social media for longer than you intended.

Read the rest here. 

For someone who spends a lot of time blogging (or cutting and pasting from the blogs of others), so much time online, and all of that time on Facebook, that extract really resonated with me.  I can't say I will immediately change my daily routine, but I will try think more about the big picture.  More importantly, I will actually try to make a few more of the small steps and sacrifices required to achieve my long-term goals.  Who knows, I may even spend a little less time on Facebook ...

(A big thank you to Trevor Cook for the hat tip.)