How to deal with all the tweets
An interesting question came up in my “empty your inbox” post.
Similar to a messy inbox, my new distraction is unread tweets in tweetie. How do you handle twitter? Do you put it off until certain times or keep up with it all day?
Simple answer: I don’t. Twitter is an information luxury to me. You don’t NEED to keep up with it.
If you do (for some reason) want to keep up with a certain set people, a certain topic, etc, download TweetDeck, and set up some searches and groups. Easy.
For awhile, before I realized that I didn’t HAVE to keep up with Twitter, I had several searches and groups set up that kept me organized:
- A search for my username. This replaced my “replies” column as it would also show when anyone mentioned me outside of a reply
- A search for the topic du jour. This changed from time to time.
- A group called “close”. This was a very stripped down group of people whose tweets I (for whatever reason) wanted to keep an eye on.
- A group called “local”. This was a group of people I was likely to encounter in “real life” who would probably ask me if I saw their tweet. I paid closest attention to these.
Hope that’s helpful.
May 26th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Haha, right on. I definitely got used to the "I don't have to read all these" real soon, and I'm not even following that many people. Good advice, but should be a no-brainer for most people.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I've created the bad habit of checking twitter every few minutes and feeling obligated to to read new tweets as if it was a mail inbox. I need to learn to let it go, it's not good for productivity. Maybe the app store has something that can fix me. :)
May 26th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
hehe… "there's an app for that…"
Hmm, twitter, I have a monetization plan for you: DETOX!
May 26th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I'm going to twitter that…
May 26th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
I just stopped following over 50 people who really don't say anything worth reading. I'm keeping an eye on my feed to watch for people broadcasting their lunch menu more than once a week, and then they're canned.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Oh, how I need to stop checking my twitter every other second. And how I wish I was able to install AIR (for Tweetdeck) on my work computer. My home is clear of Twitter or its apps though. Thank God.