Week without Twitter – postscript

I made it through. After Wednesday, it became rather easy to remain Twitter-free fro the rest of the week. Thursday night was the presentation by Ken Robinson in Saskatoon. The presentation was book-ended by some quality time with my Posse. The microphone was on so we recorded our somewhat disjointed conversation while we were waiting for Sir Ken Robinson and then a bit again after the presentation. I think it’s worth a listen if you have the time – EdTech Posse podcast 5.7 – Waiting for Sir Ken Robinson.

Friday passed by without any desire to tweet (busy days at work are good for that, I suppose). I finally broke down after midnight.

Uh – I think I meant ‘tweeps’, not ‘twerps’.

Since then I’ve kept the tweetage down to about 20 tweets – not bad over the course of a single week.

So what have a learned/gained from all of this. Mainly, I have realized that my life will proceed just fine if I’m not connected to Twitter all the time. I can survive a few days without just fine. Even since coming back, I’ve been less connected than I had been. Tweetdeck isn’t running all the time and I don’t spend time hitting refresh on the Twitter home page. I’ve moved it from being an always on, background activity to being an explicit chosen activity. I get less distracted from my family and work by keeping my twitter time as its own discrete block of time.

I also came to realize that I use twitter primarily as a social connection when I’m feeling bored or lonely. If I’m up at 1:00 a.m. working on marking or lesson planning I can always check in on twitter to confirm to myself that yes, there are indeed other people alive and communicating somewhere in my virtual world. A similar thing happened when I lived in residence. No matter how late you were up, there was always at least one other person awake – handy if you needed a game of cards as a brain break.

I’m not going to be giving twitter up, but I am going to be more thoughtful about its place in my life. I’m going to try to plan my twitter time as being a time when that is the focus of my attention instead of the focus of my distraction. And if I’m tweeting because I’m awake at 1:00 a.m., I’ll take that as a sign I should go to bed, not get sucked into Twitter.

OK – time to post this, shut off tweetdeck and get back to work!