davesacre

Let me start out by saying:  I LOVE TWITTER!

Ok, now that is out of the way.  Here’s the deal, getting involved in twitter can change your life and your career.  Just kidding…it WILL change your life.   The problem is once you get involved, it starts to take hold…THEN you go to a tweetup and you’re hooked.

I got my twitter account in June of 2007.  It took about a year for some more of my early adopter friends to grab ahold of it and get their accounts and start conversing on there.  Once we started talking and introducing each other to our other friends on there, we started hearing about these things called tweetups.  It’s a combination of twitter and meetup.  It’s basically an informal networking event where you can go around and meet other people.  I ended up meeting a TON of awesome people and I was seriously hooked.

As I met people and started following them, they led me to other cool people to follow.  I then went to more tweetups and met more awesome people and that led to even more awesome people to follow.  It’s an amazing endless cycle of new friends and flood of tweets.

The problem with meeting a ton of awesome people on twitter is that I wanted to keep up with them.  The problem with keeping up with all of them means there are a ton of new inputs into my life.  The problem with a ton of new inputs into my life is that it’s *really* *really* *really* distracting.

I really want to keep up with everyone, but I just don’t have the time.

So, to help deal with all the distractions, I decided to make some changes to how I use twitter.

• I don’t have twitter open all the time.  I open it up throughout the day.  I decided that it is ok to miss some things that go on.
• I started using lists of people. I figured out that I’m just not able to keep up with everything that goes on with everyone’s lives.  There are certain people that I would like to have more consistent updates from, so I set them apart with a list.
• I also stopped updating twitter all the time.  The less I put out there, the less people will respond directly to me.  This is a good and a bad thing.  It’s good to help keep distractions down.  It’s bad though, because I’m not participating in the conversation that is Twitter.

So, all that to say….I started using twitter in moderation.  :)

I’m not going to lie, I do miss all the interaction, but I have found it way easier to actually start to get things done.  I definitely plan on engaging quite a bit more once things get into a routine again with work, but until then…we’re sticking with twitter in moderation.  It really helps keep the focus!