Life After Two Twitter-less Workdays

Earlier this week I wrote about my plan to remove major distractions from my workday. I’m happy to report back and let you know that my plan was wildly successful. Shutting down my email client (when appropriate), Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feed-reading was a great decision. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to go, but I was left feeling more productive and way less anxious by each day’s end. Now, I’m sure each change I made factored in in its own way, but the big surprise for me was Twitter.

I got serious about using Twitter back in 2008 when the service was starting to really hit its stride. It seemed like everyone was on it, particularly in my field of higher education. It wasn’t a huge distraction back then, but quickly I found it to have become almost an addiction for me.

Free moment while my wife is looking at clothes? I think I’ll check Twitter. Standing in line at the bank? I wonder what people are saying on Twitter. At the meeting, but it hasn’t started yet? Somebody must have said something interesting in the last five minutes. Finished responding to an email? Let’s have a look at the tweetstream.

You get the idea.

So, for the last two days, I decided that, between the hours of 8 AM and 5 PM, I would turn the firehose off. Okay, if I’m being honest, there were two exceptions: lunchtime on Wednesday, and briefly during some downtime on Thursday morning. I looked at Twitter, but it wasn’t enough to be a true distraction. For the rest of the day it was smooth sailing with the plan of looking at my stream when I got home in the evening.

It’s been wonderful.

Now, I have to offer this disclaimer: I do care what you have to say. I’ve gotten to know great people, learn a ton about my profession, and stay in tune with new technology since I started using Twitter. I want to know what’s important to the people I follow, I really do. It’s just that, like everything else, Twitter has to fit in to my workflow and my life in a way that doesn’t keep me from doing real work. Recently it had become that for me, and I had to make a change.

I still read all of the tweets that came through during the past two days. I don’t feel like I missed anything, either. I just took those many times of checking during the day and squashed them into the 10 or 15 minutes it’s taken to look through them, add links to Instapaper, and respond. It’s been a great plan for me.

I challenge you to give it a shot — turn Twitter off during your workday for just a day. Or two days. Or a whole week. The change may not affect you the way it has for me this week, but if you’re anything like me, I guarantee you’ll notice a difference in the way you feel at the end of the day.

Then you’ll be able to hop on Twitter and let us know how it went.