For the plugged-in, too many choices

Josh Kaufman has curtailed his morning social media routine.[Photo/The New York Times]

"Automation, both in terms of when content goes out and the syndication, that's what keeps me from going insane," said Josh Kaufman, the author of "The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business." "Otherwise it would just be too much to manage."

Mr. Kaufman's Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are tied to his Twitter page, so when he posts an update on Twitter, it appears on all three accounts. "And when I can figure out how to make it syndicate to Google+, I'll do that, too," he said, though he initially resisted Google+. "Do I really need another thing to keep track of?" he said he had wondered.

The answer was no, but so far Mr. Kaufman, 29, of Fort Collins, Colo., has kept his social media routine to less than 30 minutes each morning (well, except for the day he spent pruning the list of people he followed on Twitter to 85, down from an indigestible 1,500).

That said, he keeps his social networking dashboards open on his computer all day to absorb their hiccups of information. Because he works alone, he likes the "water cooler effect" of his friends' feeds: the ease with which he can say hello to someone far away, if only for a moment.

When he has to focus, he relies on Freedom, a productivity application that blocks the Internet for up to eight hours. Alternatively, he configures his computer so that when he tries to point his browser to, say, Google+, the computer takes him to a page on the desktop instead.

"If you use your willpower once to change the environment," he said, "there's no discipline required."

Some users think all this networking is leading to alienation.

"I like to spend the time with someone in a restaurant than spend the time on Foursquare telling people I'm in the restaurant," said Graham Hill, 40, the founder of the Web site TreeHugger and the design contest LifeEdited. Speaking from a cabin in Canada without Internet service, he said he uses Twitter and Facebook and is poking around Google+, though he strives to be efficient.

For instance, he will read a book on his Kindle, upload inspiring quotes and ideas to his Amazon account, then edit them into Twitter posts, which he schedules to be posted over the course of several weeks via the monitoring service HootSuite.com.

Some day, he hopes to hire someone to edit and post content for him so he can spend more time offline.

"The in-between times are important," he said, referring to life's idle moments, like standing in line at the bank or taking a taxi, "times when you should be checking in with yourself instead of trying to be somewhere you're not."

Plenty of people have taken a social media detox, or opted out only to opt back in again. Ms. Lawrence said she evaluates all networking sites by asking herself a single question: "Will it enhance my life?"

Every networking site has its own culture, said Brian Solis, a principal at Altimeter Group, a technology research firm, and the author of "The End of Business as Usual." But each culture is not right for each and every person.

"Value is in the eye of the beholder," said Mr. Solis, adding that a small percentage of readers of his networking sites said they were suffering from social network fatigue. Then again, they usually get a second wind.

"Everyone is still talking about filing e-mail bankruptcy," he said. "At the end of the day, you still use it."