Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed that checking Twitter nearly constantly has taken up a considerable portion of my spare time. Often this has gotten in the way of more productive activities like writing blog posts, reading books, developing side projects and so on.
For the last couple of days now I’ve tried staying away from my timeline completely and only using DMs and mentions when necessary. All of a sudden I made quite a lot of progress in the books I’m reading and also with at least one of my side projects. It also lowered my stress level to a nearly tolerable level. Before, I thought I needed to really see my whole timeline. Every morning I was distressed by seeing nearly 500 new unread items and constantly fought to get that number to reach 0.
Instead of doing this I’ve started relying more and more on Feedly as my primary news-source again. Here, the number of new items is much more manageable for me and also allows me to more easily skip certain topics I’m not interested in right now.
Does this mean I will leave Twitter for good? Definitely not. Instead, I will most likely just disable any kind of timeline-sync feature in Tweetbot for iOS and macOS in the next couple of days. Not using the service for the last week has shown me that I still really like it but that I have to find a way for myself to not make it stress me out. This is only my first real attempt at that :)
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂