Time Sinks - the Forum

Posted by Colin Harvey Jul 7, 2009

So I've been moved again in the day job, and this time the desk doesn't even have a pc; it's as if whatever few little things make this most dreary of mind-melting jobs even remotely bearable has to be stripped out piece by piece, until there's only hour after hour after hour after unrelenting hour of ripping sheets of paper out of the files, and removing staples and cutting mounting cards up for optical disking.

Oddly enough the removal of the pc may actually prove beneficial in the long run. They can't stop me thinking, and I've had time ro do nothing bu think. What I became acutely conscious of was how much there was to do when I finally get home. I've mentioned before the battles I have in balancing writing versus promoting, and that I have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Goodreads and WordPress.

It was when I sat down and itemized the forums (fora?) on which I need to keep a presence that I thought OMG. I joined SFWA a week ago -it's a career must- which adds another forum to HWA, BFS, BSFA, Suite101, Codex and...this list seems endless. It's actually nine different forums.

I managed the profile aspect by rigging posts to Twitter to (automatically) forward to Facebook, and for Wordpress to (manually) import from LiveJournal. But even that takes time,and all I'm doing there is posting the address of the latest Suite101 blogs. The downside to Fora / forums (whatever they are) is that those lead to actual discussions.

If I spend just 10 minutes a forum, I'll need to devote 90 minutes. That doesn't include Facebook, LJ, etc.

There has to be a way of managing this without dropping out of forums, but I'm buggered if I can see how. What I may do is pick the brains of more experienced writers on SFWA and elsewhere.

Any thoughts and/or suggestions apart from 'drop some of them' will be much appreciated.