This month’s ASTD Big Question is all about how people have time to participate in social media. Here is the exact question:

• How much time do you spend and how did you find time for all the relatively newer things like reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.?
• What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago?
• Do you have less of a life with all of these new things?

How do I spend my time?

I am not sure how much time a day I spend on social media. I share a ride to work, and am on twitter for the 15 minute drive. When I get to work I’ll check twitter, then yammer, then email. Our internal social media site runs on Clearspace, and I have subscribed to the various communities that can help me with my job. I will get email notifications of any new activity in those communities. If I see something that relates to my job I’ll check it out. If I think it could help out of my team mates I’ll forward the email to them.

Since I am a community manager of our EMC Proven Professional Community I subscribe to all activity on that site. My duties there have me blogging, tweeting, and posting to LinkedIn groups and Facebook.

If I need a break at work, I look at twitter. I use TweetDeck, and have my followers sorted by work peeps, social media peeps, and edu peeps. I also have a couple of search columns related to the community I manage. I can always count on the storage tweeps for some good links and general humorous distraction in the mornings.

I’ve been participating in mentoring sessions and demonstrations of social media at work. I always work on the presentation at night and give the presentation at lunch. I’ve been using these presentations to work on the Pecha Kucha style of presentation.

I have lots of RSS feeds in my newsgator account. These are seperated by Asperger’s blogs, storage blogs, education blogs, social media blogs, and cartoons. 😀  I try to go through all of the feeds at least two times a week. I bookmark the posts I want to share using delicious, and those bookmarks go to my blog and to my facebook account. I participate in #lrnchat every week. I try to blog at least twice a week.

When I am in class, I am always on twitter, many times asking questions about what I am studying. This summer I am taking a Web 2.0 learning and performance class, so everyone get ready!!

What am I doing less of?

I think I bug my family less. I have to talk things out to understand them. Now I can interact with people who are actually interested in the same stuff that inspires me.

Do I have less of a life?

I am a grad school student. I have no life. So lets see what happens when I graduate…unless I pursue my PhD that is.

I still cook dinner, have a garden, help both my kids, and will can and freeze veggies this year. I’m carrying a 4.0 at school and I do pretty well at work. I do have a hard time getting to the gym though.

So I’m not sure if I have less of a life. I love the connections I’ve made because of all the new tools I use, I almost think I have more of a life. I’m constantly thinking and rethinking, and that spills over to my family and friends.

Maybe I’m using the tools are helping enrich my life as well as the people around me. Heck I even got Brian to admit Twitter is a good tool, and that is saying something!