Twitter is a very useful tool, but at some point, twitter can become a terrible waste of time. And this is very likely to happen when you have a desktop client. Twitter can increase your productivity, but at some point the benefit from twitter reverses itself, and twitter starts taking away from you, instead of giving to you.
When I started using twitter, I really didn’t understand it. I just knew that if I had many followers, I would be able to push a message out to many people. That sounded like a good thing, so I joined twitter, and started trying to get followers. Initially, I had a lot of benefit from twitter – I could get answers replied immediately, I could see what was currently happening, as one of the people I followed was sure to tweet it.
But then at some point, the benign helpfulness of twitter turned dark. I started checking twitter whenever I took a short break from work. And there would invariably be something interesting to look at, and I’d waste 10 minutes reading an article. I’d tweet, not because I had to, but because I wanted replies and some type of acknowledgment that I still existed.
I ran a short experiment over a couple of days, and discovered that twitter as a distraction, took away more than an hour of productive time out of my day! I was getting less done that before I had twitter, which was unexpected, as I had not even noticed this happening.
I tried using the web version of twitter, but the problem was that with the web version, you don’t get notified when people mention you. Then turned up notifo, that nice iphone tool that makes a loud ping whenever you are mentioned on twitter (or when people reply to your comments on hacker news).
After installing it, I discovered something. With notifo, I get all of the realtime of twitter (it’s even faster than tweetdeck in notifying), and none of the distraction of always having a stream of people pushing information to me.
Desktop clients allow people push information to you, and they are easily accessible, that instant distraction is just a single icon click away. The web is not as easily accessible, so it does not push the info to you. Rather, you go and visit it when you need to.
After I deinstalled tweetdeck and used notifo and the web, I discovered that my productivity went back up
- I was no longer being distracted by the one-click-away desktop client
- I could still participate in the realtime conversation with notifo
- My twitter reading because less frequent, freeing up a lot of time for real work
The instant gratification of twitter clients is terribly addicting, and it gives a false sense of accomplishment. But in actuality, nothing is achieved. Having this stream of information being pushed to you is nothing but a distraction – it neither helps your business nor educates you a lot.
Using web twitter together with notifo is the solution to this problem. It places you at that sweet spot where twitter helps you as much as it can, without taking away from you by distracting you.
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Ironically, follow me on twitter here
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