As I’ve become more engaged in my usage of twitter I’ve found myself in a situation where it can suck up more and more of my time – the same applies for other forms of social media, by the way, such as Facebook or MySpace for example…
The time sink aspect of social media is what Sarah Perez explores in her post on Read/Write web today about how Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media. She writes:
Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media as we are.
And I think this is true – but it’s also worth pointing out that even in the amount of time that I devote to social media in the course of a day – it’s almost impossible for me to keep up with all of the traffic on twitter and other services – though I do find them to be valuable tools that I’m glad exist.
It’s the productive use of Twitter that is explored by Corvida over at SheGeeks today in a post about how to manage twitter’s level of distraction while you work:
My workflow is often disrupted due to Twitter. It took me three hours to write a post yesterday because I was constantly trying to split my attention between Firefox and Twitter. To be honest, this is not going to work for anyone, especially if you’re Twitter stream is a heavy one.
The best solution is to simply exit Twitter: exit your client, close your Twitter tab, and move on.
Corvida goes on to provide some solid & practical ideas on how to manage the level of distraction that Twitter can interrupt your work day with.
For me, I use twhirl on a mac, so I do indeed sometimes have to exit out of the application in order to concentrate on what I’m trying to accomplish.
How do you manage your distraction while using twitter?
