I am just over one-third of the way through my Holidays Twitter-Sleep, which I’ve scheduled from Thanksgiving through Christmas.
It’s going surprisingly well. For the first few days, I did have a desire to check my Twitter feed; I told myself it was to make sure I didn’t have any of my tweets dangling out there, causing me future problems. But in truth, checking my Twitter is such a strong habit it’s like brushing my teeth—if I don’t do it, I just feel wrong.
But now? I am hardly giving it a second thought.
And the greatest benefit to date? Well, my writing time has increased significantly—orders of magnitude more than the time for an actual tweet.
This suggests to me that my Twitter engagement is using up quite a lot of my creative capital (and occasionally my emotional capital, if a get drawn into the wrong digital rabbit-hole).
For example, it takes only 60-seconds for me to to physically compose a well-crafted tweet, but it may take me 15-minutes to think about it first, and then—after diving into Twitter, checking for responses—I may find myself going through several of these 15-minute cycles throughout the day, all initiated by one tweet.
That’s not always a bad thing; after all, having digital conversations on Twitter is one thing it can do quite well. But, if it isn’t an intentional conversation, then it usually slips into a time drain, and that is a bad thing.
Anyway, I do intend to spend some time over the next two weeks sans-Twitter thinking about how to better use my time and energy engaging with Twitter—and yes, I do appreciate the irony here!