I Have A Life

OK, so maybe it’s not red carpets every night and maybe I don’t put on a tux or white dinner jacket each evening to dine. However, like most of you, I have a life. I have friends with whom I stay in touch beyond Facebook. I have business associates with whom I correspond beyond email. I sometimes need to express myself in more than 140 characters and sometimes people want to take what I have to say, give it some thought, and answer me back in a few sentences.  I have a family and occasionally we speak.  The funny thing is, it turns out I’m not the only person like this and the folks like me are of all ages.

What’s promoting the rant?

I spend a lot of time in tech. My clients expect me to be informed about what’s going on and what new things are just beyond the horizon.  When something such a Google+ or Spotify shows up, they want me to know what it’s about, what it means to their business, and how it impacts their customers.  What that means is that I also see the level of competition between all these things for people’s’ time.  There is, however, one thing that seems to get swept under the rug.

Time is a finite thing.  There are 86,400 seconds in a day – 1,440 minutes.  Some of them (fewer and fewer) are spent sleeping.  The rest are not just spent staring into a screen of some sort, at least not for the vast majority of people who have lives.  I don’t know about you, but I’m at the saturation point.  I don’t think I have it in me to maintain multiple social networks, spit out pithy comments about my life and the world, play social games, write this screed, and do the other hundred things that want some of those 1,440 as well as live my non-digital life.  I’ll bet you might be starting to feel the same way if you’re not there already and we’re not alone.

There is a business point.  If you’re a digital business or an analog business using digital, you’d better be damn relevant.  Not prominent, not available – very relevant, personal, flexible, and all the things that will get you a few or a few more of the 1,440.  Right now, I don’t have any to spare.  Do you?