More than a luxury, protecting one’s attention span is a necessity for people spending a lot of time on social media. Especially when they work on said social media.
It’s no secret that over the last decade(s) we’ve seen our attention span diminish. The culprit is a mix of technology improvements that made accessible tons of new information, and our brains craving that information.
If, like us, you’re spending considerable amount of times on LinkedIn to either sell, but also recruit or network, it’s worth spending a moment think about your focus-protection.
We’ve gathered for you the top 3 areas where people lose their focus on LinkedIn, and how to change that. Let’s dive in!
Protect yourself from the Feed
Over the last 20 years, feeds have been engineered by 1,000 of math geniuses to monopolize our attention. So don’t be too hard if you catch yourself scrolling like a madman: It’s hard to resist.
You can try using your willpower to stop yourself from going on the apps, or removing notifications, but let’s be honest: The whole website is designed to get you to go back to the feed and it won’t be long until you fall for it once again.
There is a very powerful way to avoid looking at feeds: Hiding them.
Simply use a sheet of paper and tape it in the middle of your laptop — just kidding:
Use a Chrome extension to hide automatically the feed when you browse the page. You’ll obtain something like this:
You can use a bunch of browser extension to do this. My personal favourite is called News Feed Eradictor which replaces the feed with an inspirational quote. Some alternatives to News Feed Eradictor (all free):
When a time comes you intentionally want to look at a feed, you’ll be able to unlock it for a limited amount of time. That friction alone decreased my time in feed pages by 70% (!!!). It works on LinkedIn, but also Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the usual suspects.
Schedule your content outside of LinkedIn
Picture this: It’s 9am and you have to write a post for LinkedIn. You open LinkedIn “for inspiration”, and start doom-scrolling. It’s now 11.48am and you’ve spent hours consuming the content of others and have produced zero, nada, squat, zilch: Nothing!
The one cause to this was browsing LinkedIn with no clear intent.
What you can do instead is to write and publish your article outside of the platform. And they are a bunch of tools to do this: Social Media Schedulers.
Below, we’re listing some of our favourites:
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The most famous: Buffer. Buffer works on all major social media and has been around for a while. You can’t really go wrong if you’re looking for a social media scheduling solution for your company.
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The most inspiring: Taplio. Taplio shows you a list of curated successful LinkedIn post to inspire you as you’re scheduling your content. It’s very clever, and a rising star of this category. Only works on LinkedIn, though.
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The free alternative: OneUp. OneUp has a free plan as long as you’re using only one platform, and our favourite free forever option.
Have a separate interface for you LinkedIn inbox
The most important place on LinkedIn is the inbox: It’s where you can talk directly to your professional network. And since LinkedIn has 500M+ active users, it’s most likely that your past, present, and future employers, clients, or employees are already there.
But (and most people having worked on LinkedIn will agree): the LinkedIn inbox is a mess.
There is a reason why the premium version of LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, gives you a totally separated interface: It is to meant to get some actual work done, not entertainment.
You too can use 3rd-party software to manage your inbox, and there’s only ONE option that makes sense: Poked (that’s us ;)
Poked gives you a Gmail like interface, but for your LinkedIn inbox. This is awesome to let you sort, organize, prioritize, and processize your daily LinkedIn DMs like a boss. Try Poked free.
What other LinkedIn tools are you using to protect your focus? What other LinkedIn tools are you using to increase your productivity? Reach out if we’ve missed something, we update our articles regularily.