When the majority of your Facebook friends work in PR or politics, you get invited to extremely random events and groups. Over the weekend, someone invited me to the launch for a time management book, 168 Hours.

This invite was interesting because part of the launch involved an experiment to track your time for one week, based on the concept that there are 168 hours in each week, and provided an Excel file to track your time in 30 minute increments for the week.

Intriguing. If someone asked you, could you accurately describe how you spend all 168 hours per week?

I’m three days into tracking my time. So far, I spend a lot of time answering email, reading news and tweeting.

Is Twitter is the black hole of time management and productivity? At work, I have a dual monitor set up with my laptop and keep one screen devoted to Tweetdeck. Part of this is necessary since I need to know breaking news in my job field and monitor various topics. However, anyone who actively tweets will tell you that a large percentage is just for fun. Sometimes, you can do the two at the same time, but it is still an overwhelming time management challenge.

By tracking my time, I’m also much more aware of how I spend it. When I click over to my second monitor, I’m keeping an eye on how long I interact. It was particularly evident this week, when I realized 45 minutes had gone by during a Twitter debate. Rather than stick with it, driven by the compulsion to have the last word, I broke it off and got back to work.

Experts debate on the effect that social networks have on productivity, but what is Twitter doing to our attention spans? Back in college (2000-2004), I could lock myself in the stacks of the library for five or six hours at a time, only getting up for bathroom breaks. Those were the last few years before smart phones and wifi, so I could study without distractions. Fast-forward two years to grad school (2006-2007), and I noticed a marked difference in my study habits. I had to take breaks every 30 minutes to check email or the news, and that was before anyone else was on Twitter.

Is it possible to have a long attention span anymore? Even when I turn off Tweetdeck or shut down gmail, which generally stays open in the background, I’m mentally checking to see if someone is chatting or I have a Tweetdeck message.

According to the New York Times, this constant connectivity has re-wired our brain.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

The age of information addiction? My need to absorb news has actually created a neurological dependency for a steady stream of dopamine? According to the article:

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

Doesn’t this sound like most bloggers?

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Breaking news is my catnip, and I know I’m not alone.

However, this doesn’t seem to have killed my productivity. Looking over my tracker, I actually accomplished far more than I could have guessed. This is also normal according to the NYT:

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.

The trick is knowing when to shut everything down. The people profiled in the NYT piece struggle with it, and it’s hard.

Technology is changing us psychologically, mentally, socially and professionally. It may improve our productivity and help the bottom line, but it is actually changing humanity.

Everybody knows at least one.

Those strange individuals who refuse to join social networks. Your un-Facebook friends.

Today (err yesterday, as it’s 1 am), the Washington Post did an article on young adults who fall within Facebook demographics, yet refuse to join.

The vast majority of their peers in the millennial generation are social networking pros: About 85 percent of all Internet users 18 to 34 visited Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in August, according to ComScore, a Reston-based Internet data research company. And about 84 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds check social networking sites at least once a week, according to a May study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around it. A twentysomething not on Facebook. It’s so strange.

Up until this May, I knew one.
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