Conclusion

If all we ask of productivity tools is that they help us do the same work a little faster or easier, we aren’t asking enough. The social web offers us the opportunity to build and support new kinds of working relationships, to extend the reach and impact of the work we do, and most crucially, to focus on the work that provides the greatest value to us, our organizations, and our world.

Professionals who use social tools to reinvent the very core of the work they do represent a new kind of leader: a social leader. A social leader isn’t characterized by his or her public persona on social media. In fact, a social leader may be virtually invisible on Twitter or LinkedIn. A social leader is someone who provides extraordinary value to his or her organization, colleagues, and clients through the use of these technologies.

Social leadership is the antithesis of how we’re often told we should use social media: to “keep up.” We’re supposed to keep up with e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and whatever other communications channels spew an endless series of tasks our way. We’re supposed to keep up with the latest must-try gadgets and must-join social networks. We’re supposed to keep up with the latest industry trends and the hottest online memes.

But keeping up is about following someone else’s agenda: the bloggers and tweeters who trot out invitations to the latest beta, and the marketers, publicists, and journalists who blanket us with coverage about the latest hot tech phenomenon. And yes, the tech consultants who charge tens or hundreds of thousands to add new musts to your already long to-do list. The minute you stop trying to keep up, you open a far more exciting possibility: getting ahead with what matters to you, your team, and your business.

To be a leader today, you have to let go of the fantasy of keeping up with social media. Instead, you must focus on becoming a social leader, someone who can truly contribute and thrive in a professional world that has been reinvented by the advent of social media. That doesn’t mean getting special training so that you can succeed in social media. On the contrary, it means using social media to develop the skills, habits, and mind-set that characterize today’s successful leaders.

Making thoughtful use of a web-based notebook like Evernote is one of the best ways to train yourself to think and act this way. By ensuring you capture everything, it helps you stop wasting time trying to find or recall that missing bit of information and instead focus on the places where you can add real value. By organizing your work around your key goals, it keeps your top priorities front and center so that you stay on mission as well as on task. By making it easier for you to share your work, it develops your capacity to draw on the contributions of others and to extend the value of your own work as widely as possible. The habits you develop by using Evernote thoughtfully and intentionally—habits that focus on supporting your goals, rather than scrambling to keep up—are the habits that will serve you well on any social platform and in any workplace or aspect of your life that you plug into the social web.