Twev1701.net

Sep
11
2008

A Cyber Social Experiment

I am in the midst of a little experiment.

On Tuesday night, I realized at about 7pm that I had spent most of my last day of vacation on the computer. Not that this is a bad thing, not an uncommon event in my life, but I had an epiphany. I had spent most of the day refreshing Twitter, and ready social sites. In essence, I had spent my day micro-blogging about doing nothing and reading about what everyone else was doing.

That’s really when it hit me. I didn’t do anything because I was watching, via text, what everyone else was doing all day. To me, this realization made me feel quite pathetic.

So, right then and there, I knew I had to make a change. Looking for the most extreme case of this behavior, I immediately thought of Twitter. Between tweeting and receiving tweets from all my friends, I typically log about a 1,000 text messages a month on my phone. I sat down and did the quick math. Making a typical tweet from my phone cost me about 20 seconds. Reading the average tweet should be about 5 seconds. In an atypical month, about 3/2 of my texts are received, and the remaining 1/3 are sent. That equals about 56 minutes a month reading tweets and almost 2 hours sending tweets from my phone.

No wonder I don’t get things done in the course of my day!

That was a no brainer. I quickly turned off text notifications from Twitter to my cell phone. Once I did that, I honestly felt a littler liberated. Feeling all powerful, I decided to kick it up a notch. I then decided not use Twitter for the next 7 days and see if I become more productive. All I will allow myself is the luxury to check Twitter 3 times a day via my computer at home. So far, I can honestly say I feel more productive, especially at work. It can get quite annoying when you’re trying to work and your pocket keeps vibrating. Even worse than a vibrating pocket is simply ignoring them. By the time I go on lunch, I have a solid 40 tweets from the morning.

Also liberating is the feeling that I need to tweet everything that I am doing. Instead of deciding to go to lunch, stopping, tweeting about it, and then actually going to lunch, I just go to lunch now.

I’ll probably end up going back to Twitter once this experiment is over, but I won’t be the hardcore user I used to be. I’m not even sure I’ll turn cell phone notifications back on. I kind of like not being constantly distracted by my vibrating thigh.