The day I quit twitter
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Today was the day I quit twitter.
Actually, “quit” is too strong a word, but today is the first day in months/ years that I haven’t been checking it all day, every day, at least every few minutes. Other than times where i’m completely “offline”, this is the first time i’ve reached midday without checking it all. If it’s not an addiction is certainly a bad habit!
Over the last few days I had become increasingly annoyed with twitter, in the same way you can become annoyed with anything if you overdo it. I’d been trying to work out how best to handle the signal to noise ratio, how I might prune the list of people I follow (without offending people), or how to apply filters to narrow down what I was receiving. But then last night I deleted my twitter client from my phone, removed tweetdeck from the dock on my laptop and decided to see what happens without it.
Right now, I have mild anxiety over “missing out” on stuff - from social gatherings, to “stuff” that people are talking about. On a positive note, I will hopefully have less of those conversations where someone tells me about something they have done/said/bought/broken/invented/eaten and my stock reply is “yeah, I saw your tweet about that…”
In the web world, I might miss out on some new techniques and technology, although i’m sure anything pertinent will eventually appear on my radar. In the real world i’ll still get the news through traditional media, and the bbc news website of course.
Besides missing out on important stuff I think other people might be talking about, the “twitterverse” is surely missing out on a whole load of my inane thoughts that I would have compulsively tapped out on my phone or laptop at various points today. One of those things is that I will hopefully blog more, as all this self-indulgent drivel has to go somewhere…. I’m also hoping to be more productive on personal projects - I have to keep myself creative by taking a break from client work and building stuff that i’m not being paid for, and I think a lot of that energy has been sucked up in twitter recently.
So anyway, I haven’t deleted my account or have any immediate intention of doing so. I also haven’t announced anything on twitter - it will just invite conversation and draw me back in. I just need to cold turkey - let’s see how long I last!
