In the first post of my “your networking platform is not dead, but it’s not alive either” series, I reviewed that alumni already have too many apps in their professional and personal lives. 

So here’s the next hurdle: your alumni are too busy. They don’t have time to engage (they way you want them to). 

With a good share of white collar professions going to remote work in 2020, saving commuting and work-drive-by-distractions, and becoming more comfortable engaging exclusively digitally, you’d think that this would translate to greater and more meaningful digital engagement for universities. 

But I’ve heard the opposite from alumni leaders. 

Even pre-COVID19 we lived in an “infinite world.” Work never stops because it’s always around us: email, Slack, meetings, to-do lists. And we carry it with us on our mobile phones. 

That transition in how and when we work has snuck up on us so fast that we really have not had a chance to adjust to it, and the natural reaction is stress, an overwhelming feeling of – well, being overwhelmed. The pressure to “get it all done” is immense and devalues our leisure time. 

COVID-19 has amplified this feeling and shredded that last boundary between work and our personal lives. Work had “moved in” with us and there was nothing we could do. Sure, there has been a lot of wisdom on how to stay productive from home, 

but speaking from personal experience, it is a lot easier said than done. 

While your alumni are struggling with separating work from non-work stuff at home. 

But there’s two sides to every story: turns out, “being busy” has become a status symbol.