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Image by Vin­cent van der Pas via Flickr

Besides los­ing weight, bet­ter time management/organization is one of the most desired New Years res­o­lu­tion. We, humans, are ‘yes’ addicts. Learn­ing to say ‘no’ to the right things is hard to do. Now we find our­selves with too many plates spin­ning and yet we think (or feel like we have to) add a few more every year.

Rab­bit Trail: Say­ing ‘no’ can be the most lib­er­at­ing word to learn. There is a bal­ance, and pri­or­i­ties can help you make bound­aries around your fam­ily and yourself.

Social media is one of those areas that you can quickly find your­self drown­ing in. How­ever, with the right tools, it can be as fun and inter­ac­tive as it should be.  I’m going to take a few days and dis­cuss some of my favorites. I am lost with­out my iPad. I real­ize not every­one has this toy tool, but from time to time I will high­light some apps that make my per­sonal and busi­ness life so much easier.

Out of all the social media plat­forms, Twit­ter is my vice. I started 4 years ago and quickly became addicted. With the new Twitter.com web­page, they have made it eas­ier to nav­i­gate, how­ever there are still cer­tain fea­tures I don’t like. For exam­ple, if I want to retweet some­thing some­one has sent out, I like to add my thoughts to that retweet. With Twitter.com, it doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally allow that. I have to spend time copy­ing and past­ing. Thank­fully there are some great Twit­ter tools that allow me to keep track of every­one I fol­low, con­ver­sa­tions, favorite tweet­ers, and pri­vate mes­sages (DMs).

I used to be a loyal fan of Tweet­Deck. It is a great tool and they con­tinue to make it bet­ter; how­ever, with my job (social media strate­gist), I have to man­age quite a num­ber of accounts, so basi­cally I out­grew Tweet­Deck. If you don’t need it for mul­ti­ple accounts, Tweet­Deck is sim­ple to under­stand and I highly rec­om­mend it.

I have sev­eral col­leagues that use SocialOomph and they swear by it, but I actu­ally pre­fer to use Hoot­suite. It’s absolutely fab­u­lous (and their app for the iPad is just as fab!). I can man­age accounts, lists, even my Face­book account.

Keep in mind, pick­ing a plat­form to man­age your twit­ter account(s) is like find­ing the per­fect pair of jeans. Some swear by OldNavy’s Flirt jeans and oth­ers wouldn’t wear any­thing but Lee’s…it’s all in the feel of the user. The point of these plat­forms is to help you manage/organize your time on twitter.

Some­times in the process of man­ag­ing your time, there are moments where cre­at­ing a short­cut is attrac­tive, but you want to be very care­ful with that.  I’ll talk about that on Monday.

Please remem­ber to take some time for your­self and your fam­ily today…enjoy the moment of now.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing