Only An Hour A Week On Twitter

I might as well be honest and confess that I joined Twitter to promote my blog that reviews books about history.  This was back when social media was still a fairly new thing and the prospect of creating an audience via a new platform like Twitter seemed at least plausible, even if not likely.  Well that was 2009, and now Twitter isn’t the bright new transformative agent of the future.  It is a time sink.


In fact, I am pretty much addicted to it.  Checking my Twitter feed isn’t the very first thing I do each day, but I have checked in before breakfast most mornings.  And it is always what I read while I am eating breakfast.   I really enjoy it.  I enjoy the jokes.  I like being directed to articles I would otherwise never know about.  I have got to no quite a few regular users well enough to find occupying the same place in my brain that I keep my friends.  And it is a great place to pop all the observations that I have during the day.  I have even had the odd tweet that has garnered a respectable number of retweets.  I am shallow enough to find this rather pleasing.

In fact it plays such a big part in my life that it has become something I have had to start thinking about seriously.  Much as I enjoy it, do I really want to spend so much time and energy on it?  Should I be doing something more constructive?  And is it eroding my ability to pay attention to longer and more in depth forms of communication?

And on top of all that, it has had almost no impact on my blog.  I get a tiny trickle of referrals from Twitter.  It is definitely not the answer to promoting my blog, which remains about as thoroughly ignored as anything on the web can be.

So I have decided to do an experiment.  Can I work out a way of doing all my Twitter stuff in one intense one hour burst every week?  That way it will build rather than detract from my ability to concentrate.  It will also enable me to focus on doing a bit more work on my blog rather than just following the flow of whatever puts Twitter in my head.  And the rest of the week I can get on with doing more constructive stuff.   The plan will be -

15 minutes thinking of stuff to put up that is just general chit chat
15 minutes looking for content to share (I can use that as research for content too)
15 minutes scheduling tweets
15 minutes reading reactions and responding to them

Let’s see how it goes.