I had to face a tough realization yesterday: My Twitterstream has grown too large for me to possibly stay afloat in it. At the time of writing this post, I’m following 121 Twitter accounts. It takes far too much of my mental energy to stay on top of the conversations that are taking place.
And, unfortunately for my readily engaged mind, those conversations are interesting. Twitter is another one of those creations that has proven to be a major time-suck for me. My experience with it echoes, in noteworthy ways, my Second Life experience. I would lose hours upon hours in Second Life and have no idea where all the time went.
Looking back, I recognize that most of that time was spent engaging in near-synchronous conversation. Like normal conversation, only slower.
Twitter is really the same thing, except, for me, the conversation is happening amongst 121 people, each of whom is also talking to all of the people in their unique network. It’s a busy conversation that keeps going 24 hours a day, peaking during business hours and early evening in the US, exactly when I need to be focused on other things.
I eventually made the decision to step away from Second Life. I’ve never been good at doing something partway and Second Life required a substantial commitment to be meaningful. I’ve only been back infrequently since and it’s never had the same pull that it did initially, when I felt truly connected to what was going on there.
The amount of commitment that Twitter has drawn from me suggests that the time has come for me to make a similarly aggressive move there.
Stepping away from Twitter will have consequences. I’ll miss conversations of which I would like to be a part. I’ll be less connected to many of the people I think of as my friends in the professional sphere. I’ll miss many of the things that the people I trust find interesting (but not interesting enough to write full blog posts about them). In short, I’ll be out of the loop. But what I gain back is more important: I recover a big chunk of my own head space.
Of course, there are other ways of managing the Twitter experience. Many other Twitterers are able to find balance in a way that I’m not sure is possible with the way I currently use Twitter. For example, I don’t have to follow everyone who follows me, but I’m naturally interested in people who are interested in me. A nice notion, but it doesn’t scale well.
I don’t actually have to pay attention to other people’s updates at all. I could still push my updates out to whomever was inclined to listen. And maybe that’s what I’ll do in the long run, but I’m not presently comfortable with the notion. It’s a far cry from the Twitter presence I’ve established.
I certainly invite your suggestions. Tell me your strategy for managing the Twitter stream in the comments for this post. I’m more than willing to reconsider my approach and, in many ways, I’d like to find some sort of compromise between the dueling sides of my brain.
Either way, I’ll likely pop into Twitter occasionally, out of curiosity. I suspect that I’ll feel sufficiently removed from the conversation such that I won’t find nearly the same enjoyment in it that I do now. And that will reinforce my decision to have stepped away. But we’ll see.
There is another post in all of this about managing the growth of one’s social network. I have seven Twitter follower requests for people I don’t know. But I’ll write about that on a different day. If you want to join my social network, find me on Facebook. Oh, and when you do, start a conversation, won’t you? I like my connections to include some actual connectivity.
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